Deirdre Guthrie

This profile was current as of 2018, when she was part of the Kellogg community.

Deirdre Guthrie is a research assistant professor at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Well Being at Work Project, which partners with global health and humanitarian workers. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and gender studies from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2012.

Guthrie’s research seeks to understand how the evolving professional identity and well being of global health/humanitarian workers impacts the quality and sustainability of care and level of accompaniment of affected populations in vulnerable communities. She studies this in a context where NGOs are increasingly competitive and professionalized and workers face overwhelming pressures to be “change agents” as they witness human suffering on behalf of citizens of the global north.

Guthrie also is a consultant to the “Alive Project” at Rush University Medical Center Department of Preventive Medicine where she designed a needs assessment and trained a team of “insider” (congregants) and “outsider” (medical researchers) ethnographers to conduct field research across five African-American Baptist churches as part of a community participatory health disparity research project.