I am a third culture child, born and raised in a multicultural family in Warsaw, Poland. I have lived and worked in several countries over the years, studying at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, the University of Oxford and the University of Warsaw. I hold a PhD degree in cultural anthropology and ethnology, and have nearly 15 years of fieldwork experience in topics related to health, politics, environment, disinformation, and public understanding of science. I specialise in controversy research.
I am currently completing a long-term research project at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, where I studied the social reception of Lyme disease (borreliosis) and ticks in Poland in the years 2020-2025 (Preludium BIS funding scheme).
As an anthropologist studying medical issues, among other things, I am also a board member of the Medical Anthropology Europe network at EASA, with which we organised a medical anthropology conference held in Vienna in September 2025. I believe it is crucially important to bring the research community together, as collaboration is key to improving the quality and impact of our work. I am an avid practitioner of critical and engaged research.
Generally speaking, my research falls into the category of other-than-human studies, science and technology studies, as well as, most importantly, environmental, medical and digital anthropology. My other published works concern topics of urban transformation and identity politics in post-socialist and post-colonial contexts. Over the years, I have also actively cooperated with different NGOs as a social researcher.
In addition, I am a passionate populariser of anthropological scholarship, currently working on a popular anthro-science book on Lyme disease controversies and a children’s book on ticks, both written for Polish audiences.
PREVIOUSLY
I have previously worked as an ethnographer at the University College London in the EC-funded POPREBEL project, which studied populism in Central and Eastern Europe. I was conducting a mixed-method study among Polish voters to understand how their life experiences influence their voting choices (2021 – 2023). In late 2022, I was a guest researcher at the Hans Bredow Leibniz Institute for Media Research in Hamburg, Germany (with the NAWA Preludium BiS fellowship fund). In 2023, I was a visiting research fellow at Rutgers University’s Department of Political Science, where I worked on a project that inquired into cross-lingual information exchange among members of the Polish diaspora and the role new media play in building narratives around medical controversies. My stay was generously funded by the Kosciuszko Foundation.
In years prior, I worked as a junior researcher at the Department of Management in Networked and Digital Societies at the Kozminski University in Warsaw, where I conducted a pre-doc study on multi-platform knowledge production (2016 – 2020, Diamentowy Grant funding), focusing on information prod-usage and network practices. As a part of this project, I studied instances of online misinformation about health and nutrition and open collaboration communities that form around these topics. My focus was on GMOs. I have also worked on multiple research projects at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, of which I am an alumna.
In the years 2020-2023, I coordinated the EASA Medical Anthropology Young Scholars network.
magdalena góralska 