Rosie Jones McVey
Research fellow University of ExeterWellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health
Biographical Info
Dr. Rosie Jones McVey uses ethnography to study the diverse ways that people make sense of their own, and other minds. Her PhD (Cambridge University, 2019) investigated human relationships with horses, and particularly, people’s understanding of ‘mindedness’ as part of their ethical relationships with horses. She emphasized the ethical challenges that accompany ‘partnerships’ built without verbal language, and she highlighted the importance of representationalist theories of mind amid riding projects, bucking the trend of multispecies ethnography by leaving horses conspicuously absent from her account (her monograph is Human-Horse Relations and the Ethics of Knowing, Routledge, 2023). Dr. Jones McVey then took up a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, investigating equine-assisted therapies for UK Youth, and took forward her interest in ethics and representationalism. She has written papers about the ethical/political portrayal of young people’s goals, voices, and ‘outcomes’. She also has an interest in the way judgments, values, and responsibilities shape and are shaped by physical space. Dr. Jones McVey now studies ‘The Moral Terrains’ of Green Social Prescribing, on a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellowship, based at the University of Exeter – project details here: https://wcceh.org/projects/moral-terrains-an-anthropology-of-green-social-prescribing/.