Ayanda Masilela (she/her/hers)

My current research interests center geographies of health, discourses of health and health care, and health care accessibility. My dissertation project investigates the martial arts. WIth this project I aim to discover how practice spaces as microgeographies enable practitioners to develop understandings of health management in often high-impact environments. I will also investigate the collision of Eastern and Western medical discourses in these practice environments.

For my Master's Degree, I investigated maternal and infant health outcomes in indigenous Northern Plains communities. With that project I encountered the intersections of health, culture, and history, as well as the limitations of quantitative methods due to the inability of normative record-keeping standards to account for the consequences of systemic oppression.

As a masters student and undergraduate, my work centered GIS, spatial analysis, and quantitative methods. This is reflected in my current teaching work, which has primarily featured GIS and digital geographies. My goal is to further my understanding of the powers and limitations of specific research methodologies, and how to render visible narratives that some methodologies erase.