Caroline Melly

Caroline Melly is a sociocultural anthropologist with expertise in urban studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies. She has conducted research in West Africa, Europe, and the United States with support from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays program, and Smith College. Her research examines how ordinary people confront extraordinary moments of rupture and transformation. She uses qualitative methods to understand how people make meaning amidst uncertainty, how they hatch plans and build relations, and how they unsettle claims about expertise, authority, and agency along the way.

Her first major research project explored urban and global suspension as a constitutive feature of everyday life and city-making in Dakar, Senegal. Her book Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City (University of Chicago Press, 2017) received the Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology in 2018. She has written on global migration, foreign investment, technological innovation, gender, bureaucracy, and governance in Senegal. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, City & Society, and Africa, and in media outlets such as openDemocracy.com and Limn.

Melly’s current research explores the spectacular resurgence of cannabis as a potent and legitimate therapeutic treatment. In an era of both rapid pharmaceutical innovation and expansion and waning public trust in this industry, the case of cannabis offers powerful insights into much larger transformations underway in how people think about what makes a “good medicine.” Drawing on years of rigorous ethnographic research, this project asks what the revival of cannabis as medicine might have to teach us about evidence and truth, health and disability, and care and kinship in (and beyond) the Pharmaceutical Age.

Melly has also led teams of anthropology students in several campus-wide research projects in ANT 200 and ANT 300. Together, they have conducted research on student study habits and use of campus space; experiences of disability, teaching, and learning on Smith’s campus; and students’ experiences of grades and grading at Smith.

Melly teaches courses on topics such as disability and difference, citizenship and belonging, visual anthropology, anthropological methods, urban space and cities, kinship, digital life, science and technology, contemporary debates about cannabis, and Africa and its diaspora. She was a recipient of the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching (2014) and a Rally Day Teaching Award (2012). She also served as Director of the Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning.