Edmée Ballif is a medical anthropologist and sociologist with a focus on public health domains such as parenting advice and nutrition. She is currently serving as an SNSF postdoctoral researcher and Honorary research fellow at the Social Research Institute, University College London and working on dietary recommendations for milk consumption in children in Switzerland.

Dr. Ballif’s research is centered on the social construction of « good » parents and reproductive subjects and how public health programs contribute to the (re)production of social inequalities based on factors such as gender, sex, race, class, or nationality. She employs qualitative research methods and inductive research designs to reveal the ways in which these programs can perpetuate social hierarchies.

Her PhD research analysed the social government of pregnancy and was carried out as a doctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Lausanne (2010-2013, 2015-2017) and as a Swiss National Research Foundation fellow and visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University (USA) in 2013-2015.

These projects build on her earlier research on gender, race and nationality dynamics in social institutions such as religion, medicine and science. She has conducted research for the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Lausanne (2019-2022), the School of Health Sciences, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (2018-2020), the Sociology Laboratory (2010-2018) and the Institute of social sciences of contemporary religions, University of Lausanne (2008-2010). She holds a BA in history of religions, social sciences and history, a MA in sociology of religions and a PhD in social sciences from the University of Lausanne

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2304-524X