My Biography
Bianca Dahl is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist with deep interdisciplinary commitments. As faculty at a public university serving a student body that is disproportionately racialized, immigrant, and from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, Bianca emphasizes ethnographic critical thinking as an emancipatory mode for engaging with the world. She structures her teaching around Saloshna Vandeyar’s concept of a “pedagogy of compassion,” applying principles from radical inclusion and crip theory to integrate care into every aspect of her courses. She views her policies—such as a no-questions-asked, universal extensions practice—not simply as compassionate gestures; they are object lessons in social justice.
Bianca brings these same principles to her research, which explores the long-term effects of humanitarian efforts in response to epidemics. Her work in Botswana examines foreign-funded orphan care programs and other initiatives aimed at mitigating the impact of HIV. She critically analyzes the discourse of “cultural sensitivity”—which is widely promoted as a remedy for the many problems with postcolonial aid—revealing instead the paradoxical harms it can cause. Bianca’s research argues that the sentimental politics of cultural sensitivity often reinforce the very racialized inequalities that international development seeks to solve.
Bianca received her PhD in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University in anthropology, population studies, and the international humanities, before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.