Ayla McCullough

Dr. Ayla McCullough is a decolonial feminist scholar whose research focuses on orphaned populations in the Global South. Her work theorizes the “orphan” as a category of discard and discarded category underlying Western knowledge production in order to rethink social hierarchies of the human, child, and animal simultaneously. She is currently developing a project on the medicalization of malnutrition which draws on feminist anthropology, global public health, and critical disability studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University in May 2026.