Daisy Couture

Daisy Couture
Anthropology Graduate Student
Email
[email protected]

Education
BA, English Literature & Psychology; University of British Columbia – 2020
MA, Medical Anthropology; McGill University – 2023

Areas of Interest
Psychological and Medical Anthropology; Feminist Theory; STS; Affect Theory; Mind and Brain Sciences; UK and North America

Field Research Plans/History
Daisy is a PhD student working across psychological anthropology, the medical humanities, and gender studies with a particular interest in psychiatry and neurology and the worlds they create and are created by. 

Her dissertation project focuses on patients, activists, and clinician-researchers whose lives have become entangled with functional disorders – the phenomenon in which someone is seriously ill (seizures, paralysis, blindness, complex pain, etc.) and yet no pathophysiological cause can be found. Through this work, she explores the psychic, ethical, and political force of the mind and brain sciences in the UK. Drawing on ethnography, archival records, and literature, the project investigates the braiding of affect and epistemology in affliction (especially gendered forms of affliction) and cultural sense-making about relationships between the social, psychic, and somatic. 

Her previous research focused on patient and clinician relationships with uncertainty in the context of medically unexplained symptoms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Canadian neuropsychiatric clinic, this work followed the ways certitude travels between patients and clinicians and the simultaneous threat and possibility of flickering modes of knowing. 

Awards
2024 Society for Psychological Anthropology/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship 
2021 McCall MacBain Scholar 

Teaching History
Assistant Instructor – ANT 305 “Psychological Anthropology”; Fall 2024
Assistant Instructor – PSYC 333 “Unlocking the Science of Human Nature”; Spring 2024, Spring 2025

Membership/activities 
Professional Associations

  • American Anthropological Association (AAA) – Society for Psychological Anthropology; Society for Medical Anthropology; Association of Feminist Anthropology
  • Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S)
  • Functional Neurological Disorder Society (FNDS)

At Princeton 

  • Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS)

Selected Publications
Hsu, Vox Jo, Megan Moodie, Abigail Dumes, Emily Lim Rogers, Chelsey Carter, Emma Broder, Daisy Couture, Ilana Löwy, and Emily Mendenhall. 2025. “Patients as knowledge partners in the context of complex chronic conditions.” BMJ Medical Humanities, 51(1), 34–38. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2024-012957