HudsonMemo1revised

__**Biographical Sketch, 2020**__ Alison Kenner is a poet, healer, and faculty member at the University of Albany, SUNY. An anthropologist of the body, her current research looks at the conceptualization and experience of aging, focusing particularly on how health-care policies and practices engage age-related changes. Her work on the body investigates cultural understandings of change, the materiality of learning practices, and the political economy of complimentary and alternative medicine in the twenty-first century. Her first book, //Treating Time: Emerging Bodies and Healthcare Politics in the Twenty-First Century//, is an ethnographic account of bodywork in the US. //Treating Time// takes an in-depth look at bodywork professions, including yoga, massage, and craniosacral therapy, asking what social, economic, and political forces animate these growing fields, how does health becomes refigured through “hands-on” practice, and what do understandings and experiences with bodily change say about cultural attitudes towards change more broadly? Some of her other research centers on teaching and learning practices and is based in her involvement with SHARE (Shape Health: Alternative Responses Everyday), an Upstate New York organization that brings together CAM practitioners, local farmers, community groups, and other interested parties for discussion and workshops on health broadly. Alison Kenner is also a certified yoga instructor, licensed massage therapist, and amateur astrologer. I her spare time she tends to a beautiful garden in the mountains.

Alison Kenner, Associate Professor of Anthropology, English, and Women's Studies. Academic Interests: aging, the body, ethnography, feminist praxis, health-care, visual anthropology