Dr. Michelle Brear

Michelle Brear is a health and social science researcher whose work centers on informal caregiving, ageing, and participatory health research in Southern Africa and beyond. Her scholarship integrates medical anthropology, social policy, and ethics, with sustained ethnographic engagement in rural South Africa and Eswatini. She is widely recognized for advancing relational and care ecology frameworks to understand how care operates within resource-constrained settings.

Her research explores dementia care, intergenerational caregiving networks, and conceptions of “good care,” highlighting the interplay between family practices and structural neglect in formal systems. Through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches, she demonstrates how gender, migration, poverty, and state inaction shape everyday caregiving practices, including nuanced analyses of autonomy, reciprocity, and embodied knowledge.

Brear also makes significant contributions to research ethics, particularly in participatory action research. Her work addresses structural influences on consent, third-party disclosure, data sharing, and ethical tensions in public health crises. By foregrounding power dynamics and epistemic justice, she strengthens ethical reflexivity in global health research and promotes more context-sensitive, community-engaged methodologies.