I am a sociocultural anthropologist focused on reproduction, gender and environmental health. My approach combines social studies of science with medical anthropology and environmental humanities.
My first single-authored book, In/fertile Environments: epigenetic toxicology and the reproductive health of Chinese Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2023. The book explores how reproductive and developmental toxicologists in China imagine and materialize various environments through epigenetic research. Across five chapters -- which discuss the national, hormonal, dietary, maternal and laboratory environments -- I discuss how scientists and activists make sense of the increasingly toxic worlds in which they live. Based on fieldwork conducted in Nanjing during a time when environmental protection was often not explicitly in everyday concerns, but when the amount of toxic exposures faced by people in China was clearly growing, my research approaches epigenetic toxicology as lens through which scientists and others make sense of the embodied and potentially inheritable consequences of political-economic policies and distributed social hierarchies.
In addition to the book, I have published related peer-reviewed articles in Cultural Anthropology about variations in epigenetic understanding of personhood and the "maternal environment," in Cross Currents about the harm of endocrine disrupting chemicals can move beyond individualized human and non-human bodies, and in Medical Anthropology Quarterly on the increase of attention toward the intergenerational effects of toxic exposure or "Passing Down Pollution". I have also contributed to various online forums, including Somatosphere, Fieldsights, and this CA author interview. A short, personal essay on gender and toxicity is published in Environmental History as part of a forum called "Of Perpetrators and Victims."
I am also a participant in the Wellcome Trust funded Biosocial Birth Cohort Research Network (BBCR), which examines and utilizes birth cohort studies as reflexive method, and working with lead organizer of the network, Dr. Sahra Gibbon, on questions of integernational ethnography. I recently published an essay on this topic at Somatosphere, and co-edited a special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly, called Towards Intergenerational Ethnography (2021).
I am part of a collaborative research effort around the theme Reproducing the Environment, co-organized with Katharine Dow from University of Cambridge. We are exploring how reproductive technologies (broadly defined) are used to mitigate environmental problems, as well as questions about how and why environmental issues are often framed through questions of reproduction and future generations. We have published a book review essay on reproductive environmental justice entitled "Situating Kinmaking and the Population 'Problem'," in Environmental Humanities. The Reproducing the Environment initiative was conducted in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust funded Changing In/Fertilities project, of which I was a network participant, in particular its (In)fertile Environments sub-group.
I am now pursuing a related research project and now direct the new Collaborative Anthropology of Reproduction and the Environment (CARE) Lab. Members of the lab conduct research at the intersection of reproductive and environments studies in a variety of ways. Our current group research project is about reproductive decision making in the U.S. at a moment of global fertility rate decline. This project asks how and why young people in Arizona in particular are deciding not to have (more) children, investigating the various political, economic and ecological climates that lead to such decisions. This research is supported by a Hispanic Serving Institution Faculty Seed Grant as well as funds from Vertically Integrated Programs and the Council for Undergraduate Research Experiences. Undergraduates interested in becoming involved with the CARE Lab can email me directly for further information.
In addition, I am currently conducting exploratory research on two projects:
The first thinks through the recent rise in "sensory integration disorder" - defined and diagnosed by a number of actors from occupational therapists to nueroscientists, to nuerodiverse individuals themselves. I am especially interested in gendered and racialized questions of diagnosis and treatment, as well as the technical and ethical difficulties of conducting research on environmental etiologies of SPD. The preliminary research for this project is supported by a School of Anthropology Faculty Small Grant and the University of Arizona's Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute Leveraging Award.
Second, I am conducting background research on "cryoconservation" initiatives - or conservation efforts that primarily depend on technologies of cryopreservation. I am especially interested in the use of reproductive technologies to conserve biodiversity in the present so that it may be reproduced in the future. This is happening in a variety of seed, spore and gamete banking project, from Arizona to Taiwan. I am thinking through how the global rise of -omic understandings of egg and sperm as beings-in-relation seem to be contradicted by apocalyptic scientific imaginaries which interpret "life itself" as the future savior. My latest article, "Beyond the Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Revised a Romance through Reproductomics," in Science, Technology and Human Values touches on some of these issues. I also currently have a short piece under review for a special issue about Resevoirs that further considers the use of "Arks" in the cryoconservation of gametes, and how resevoirs are both incresingly built and destroyed in the name of biodiversity and species survival.