Dr. Downe’s research over the past 20 years has primarily concerned itself with the ways in which illness, injury, and risk are syndemically and discursively connected to cultural ideas of contagion and communicability. Working across six countries – from rural areas in Mexico and northern Guatemala, to urban areas in Costa Rica and El Salvador, to rapidly expanding neighbourhoods in Barbados, to Canadian prairie cities – Dr. Downe has explored: the intersections between HIV/AIDS and violence; maternal health in relation to HIV/AIDS and other epidemic and endemic infections; the medicalization of fatigue; the health repercussions of migrant- and local- sex work; the interaction among memory, fear and health; and the policy- and programmatic- responses to emergent health conditions. With a strong commitment to engaged anthropology, Dr. Downe’s work is community-based and she has partnered with three government-run hospitals as well as a total of twenty-four non-profit and non-governmental organizations. Because of the applied nature of her work, Dr. Downe draws primarily on the theoretical tenets of critical interpretive medical anthropology in order to adhere to the adage that “engaged and applied anthropologists should be more (rather than less) responsible for theory in order to ensure integrity and relevance to the concepts on which the work rests” (Van Esterik, 2008, personal communication).   

Dr. Downe is the 2011 Recipient of the Weaver-Tremblay Award, the award of the Canadian Anthropology Society.

Dr. Downe has held research grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Status of Women Canada, the National Network for Aboriginal Mental Healh, and RESOLVE Saskatchewan.