Thursday, October 14, 2021 - 2:10 p.m.
Zoom
Natali Valdez is an anthropologist in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Wellesley College. Her work lies at the intersections of Black, postocolonial, feminist technoscience and medical anthropology. Her research focuses on the areas of reproduction, postgenomics, racism, chronic illness, and clinical trials. She is currently on research leave supported by the AAUW American postdoctoral fellowship to begin a new project on postgenomic reproduction and intergenerational trauma.
Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era.
Weighing the Future is the first ethnography of ongoing prenatal trials in the United States and United Kingdom. Studying prenatal trials reveals larger processes of capitalism, surveillance, racism, and environmental reproduction in a postgenomic era. Valdez argues that science, and how we translate and imagine it, is a reproductive project that requires anthropological and feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, the book brings attention to how the present—the here and now—is at stake.
Sponsored by: Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology
