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Staff Profiles

Dr Elizabeth Turk

Research Fellow

Background

I am a social anthropologist with foundational training in women’s studies. My research takes an historically inflected approach to the study of power relations and health-related practices. My doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge (2018) explores the body, national identity, and natural environment as they relate to dynamic regimes of value in Mongolian public life.

 I have designed and coordinated a number of research projects funded by IIE Fulbright, Henry Luce Foundation, the American Center for Mongolian Studies, UKRI (as part of a team), and the Wellcome Trust.

 Before arriving at Newcastle, I worked as a Research Associate at Cambridge (2020-2025) on a project entitled, Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: tracing divergent healing practices across the Mongolian-Chinese border, PI-ed by Prof David Sneath and funded by the AHRC. This project traced the politics of linking health and cultural heritage, exploring the shaping effects of political economy on Covid-focused ritual practice across national borders. From 2019-2020, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City.

 Most recently, I have been awarded a Career Development Award from the Wellcome Trust for a 5.5-year project entitled, Accessing the Wellbeing Commons: therapeutic resource-ification of natural and historic environments and social exclusion in the UK and Inner Asia. This multi-sited, comparative project explores barriers to accessing therapeutic commons in Sikkim (India), Mongolia and Devon (UK), focusing on water-based health practices to better understand how identities that tend to be associated with exclusion are (re-)made through capitalist social relations.

 I have also worked as Inner Asia Regional Curator of On the Move: Rethinking Nomadic Pastoralism (2022-2023), a temporary exhibition at the National Museum of Qatar exploring the lives of nomadic pastoralists in Central Sahara, Qatar, and Mongolia.

Research

To date, my research has primarily been at intersection of medical anthropology, political anthropology, and environmental humanities. Other areas of research that interest me are: the anthropology of Inner Asia; nationalism; Tibetan medicine; medical imperialism; ritual; shamanism; cosmology and landscape; and political ecology. I am also interested developing a better dialogue between medical anthropology and adjacent scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, such as the history of the body and senses, health geography, disability studies, and the medical humanities more broadly.

 Until recently, my research has been focused on Mongolia, having conducted ethnographic research there since 2010.

 

Major grants:

 2025 - present. PI of Accessing the Wellbeing Commons: therapeutic resource-ification of natural and historic environments and social exclusion in the UK and Inner Asia. Wellcome Trust

 2020-2024. Research Associate on Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: tracing divergent healing practices across the Mongolian-Chinese border, PI-ed by David Sneath (University of Cambridge). Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).

 

Other selected grants, awards and fellowships:

 2024-2025      Sigrid Rausing Trust Early Career Fellow, The Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge.

2022-2025      Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge. 

2023               Mongolian Therapeutic Art: tracking and tracing a shaman healer’s tunic. Arts, Humanities and Health grant from University College London. £800

2023              Re-framing Therapeutic Arts: the role of cultural heritage in cultivating health and wellbeing. Workshop funding from the Centre for Research in the Arts Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge. £500

2016               Rashaan’s domog: preserving the stories and legends of healing sites in Mongolia’s‘age of the market’. Cultural Heritage Fellow, Henry Luce Foundation and The American Center for Mongolian Studies. $18,000 US.

2010-2011      Fulbright Research Scholar, US Institute of International Education. $17,500 US.

Teaching

Fore-grounding critical theory in a range of sub-disciplinary contexts, l have designed, instructed and assessed undergraduate- and postgraduate-level anthropological theory and methods courses at Columbia University (New York City) and the University of Cambridge, on a range of courses in the Department of Social Anthropology as well as the interdisciplinary MPhil course in Health, Medicine and Society. I have taught on critical issues of contemporary global life; introduction to anthropological theory; the social, economic, political and moral aspects of development; the anthropology of post-socialist societies, and topics specific to Inner Asia. I have supervised undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations and advised postgraduate independent studies. I have also worked as Director of Studies in Social Anthropology at Corpus Christi College (Cambridge).

Publications

  • Articles

    • Turk, E. Traditional Medicine, Legitimacy, and Nationalist Doxa in Pandemic-era Mongolia In Sneath, D. and E. Turk (eds.), Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia: unsettling ideologies and affective imaginations. . Central Asian Survey 2025. In Press.
    • Turk, E, Ujeed, U, White, T. Kinship Imaginaries of Similarity and Difference: gifts from Inner Mongols to Mongolia during the Covid-19 pandemic. In Sneath, D. and E. Turk (eds.), Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia: unsettling ideologies and affective imaginations. Central Asian Survey. Central Asian Survey 2025. In Press.
    • Sneath, D, Turk, E. Introduction. In Sneath, D. and E. Turk (eds.), Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia: unsettling ideologies and affective imaginations. Anticipated publication December 2025. Central Asian Survey 2025. In Preparation.
    • Turk, E. Making ‘Setgel’s Creature’ Mindful and Conceptual Change in Contemporary Mongolia. Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 11(2):1-15. Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 2024, 11(2), 1-15.
    • Turk, E. ‘Being Cultured’, Changing Culture: public health messaging in COVID-era Ulaanbaatar. Curare. Journal of Medical Anthropology 2023, 46(1), 29-45.
    • Turk, E. Transgressing National ‘Green Culture’ and the Moral Authority of Nature in ‘Age of the Market’ Mongolia. Inner Asia 2021, 23(2), 304-329.
    • Turk, E. The Politics of Ritual Form(ation) in Contemporary Mongolia. Social Analysis 2025, 63(3), 47-70. In Preparation.
    • Turk, E. Toxic Care (?): Scepticism and Treatment Failure in Post-Soviet Mongolia. Inner Asia 2018, 20(2), 219-241.

  • Authored Book

    • Turk, E. Therapeutic Nature: modernist cosmologies, concept work, and the making of healing traditions in contemporary Mongolia. Ethnographic Monograph. Under Exclusive Review, Indiana University Press. 2026. In Preparation.

  • Book Chapters

    • Turk, E, Sneath, D, Buyandelger, M. Introduction. In: Turk, E; Buyandelger, M, ed. Health Connectivities: mediating medical realities in Inner Asia. 2026. In Preparation.
    • Turk, E. Searching for the ‘root cause’ of illness and moral aetiology in Mongolian health settings. In: Turk, E; Buyandelger, M, ed. Health Connectivities: mediating medical realities in Inner Asia. 2025. In Preparation.
    • Turk, E. ‘The People’s Duty to Love and Protect’: mineral springs and the moral register of changing landscapes in Mongolia. In: Knapp, R; Havnevik, H, ed. Changing Climate and Communities in High Spaces and Icy Places. Open Book Publishers, 2025. Submitted.
    • Turk, E. Herders in the ‘Age of the Market’, Mongolia: innovation and informal networks of care. In: Abu-Lughod, L, ed. On the Move: Reframing Nomadic Pastoralism. Doha, Qatar: National Museum of Qatar, 2021.
    • Sneath, D, Turk, E. Knowing the Lords of the Land: Cosmopolitical dynamics and historical change in Mongolia. In: Knapp, R; Sneath, D; Diemberger, H, ed. Places of Power in Changing Environments. Routledge, 2021, pp.145-164.

  • Editorials

    • Turk, E, Buyandelger, M. Health Connectivities: mediating medical realities in Inner Asia. 2026. In Preparation.
    • Sneath, D, Turk, E. Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia: unsettling ideologies and affective imaginations Special Issue. Anticipated publication in Central Asian Survey December 2025. Central Asian Survey 2025. In Preparation.

  • Review

    • Turk, E. Tomas Matza, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-being in Postsocialist Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 305, 2018. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 2020, 38(1).