Kathleen Rice

Associate Professor 
Research Director
Canada Research Chair in the Medical Anthropology of Primary Care
PhD (Socio-Cultural Anthropology, University of Toronto, 2015)
 

Kathleen (Kate) Rice is Research Director in the Department of Family Medicine, where she holds the SSHRC-funded Tier II Canada Research Chair in the Medical Anthropology of Primary Care. She is a medical anthropologist whose primary research methodology is ethnography.  With two decades of research experience in academic institutions, research institutes, and academic hospitals in Canada and South Africa,  in all her work Kate's research focuses on critically investigating everyday practice to understand the discourses, ideologies, and categories that shape healthcare and well-being (broadly-defined), and the relations of power that underpin them. Driven by a commitment to high-quality, equitable, and culturally safe care for all, Kate's research program aims to improve the health of marginalized populations in particular, especially those grappling with social and economic change. Kate's specific areas of topical focus include perinatal care, chronic pain, gender-based violence, and popular justice. Her areas of geographic focus are South Africa (especially the Eastern Cape), and urban and rural Canada (especially Montreal, and Northwestern Ontario). She is the recipient of numerous awards for research excellence, and is a current delegate to the Science Meets Parliament program (https://sciencepolicy.ca/programs/science-meets-parliament/)

Kate is Co-Director (Academic) of the Partnership for the Engagement of People in Pain Research ( https://www.pepr-partnership.org). In collaboration with colleagues at the Maison Bleue in Montreal, she carrying out an ethnographic investigation of cultural safety in urban perinatal care for highly vulnerable people. Her first book, entitled Rights and Responsibilities: Gender, Personhood, and the Crisis of Meaning in Rural South Africa, was awarded runner-up for the Joel Gregory Award from the Canadian Association of African Studies, and is available here: https://iupress.org/9780253066176/rights-and-responsibilities-in-rural-s.... In addition to her appointment in Family Medicine, she is formally affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, and the School of Population and Global Health.

Her publications can be found in a range of social science and biomedical journals. A recent selection include:

Timmermans, S., Murphy-Oikonen, J., & Rice, K. (2025). "“Not Without Judgment”: Sociocultural Barriers to Accessing Sexual Assault Evidence Kits in Rural and Remote Northwestern Ontario." Violence Against Women, 1-22.

Rice, K. (2023). Re‐centering Relationships: Obstetric Violence, Health Care Rationalities, and Pandemic Childbirth in Canada. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 37, (1), 59-75

Rice K. (2023). Touching at Depth During the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Not Touching Babies Can Teach us about how to Improve Healthcare. Ars Medica, 7 (1), 1-13

Gagnon J, Mazaniello-Chezol M, Hamzeh J, Rice K. (2023). Strategies for Communicating Social Science and Humanities Research to Medical Practitioners, FQS Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 23 (2).

Rice K, Williams S. (2021) Women's postpartum experiences in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study. CMAJ open, 9(2), E556-E562.

Webster F, Rice K, & Sud A. (2020) A critical content analysis of media reporting on opioids: The social construction of an epidemic. Social Science & Medicine, 244, 112642.

Webster F, Rice K. (2019) Conducting Ethnographies in Primary Care: Methods Brief. Family Practice 36(4), 523-525.

Webster, F., Rice, K., Katz, J., Bhattacharyya, O., Dale, C., & Upshur, R. (2019) An ethnography of chronic pain management in primary care: The social organization of physicians’ work in the midst of the opioid crisis. PloS one, 14(5), e0215148.

Rice K, Eun Ryu J, Whitehead C, Katz J, Webster F. (2018) How work practices shape empathy: medical trainees’ experiences of treating people with chronic pain Academic Medicine, 93(5), 775-780.

Rice K. (2018) Understanding ukuthwala: bride abduction in the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa. African Studies, 77(3): 394-411

Rice K, Webster F. (2017) Care interrupted: Poverty, in-migration, and primary care in rural resource towns. Social Science & Medicine, 191: 77-83.

Rice K. (2017) Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa: Implications for Gender, Generation, and Personhood. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23 (41): 28-41.

Websites:

 https://www.womenrise-ukuvula-isango.com/

https://www.pepr-partnership.org/