Dubal Lecture on Race, Science and Pregnancy Trials Hosted by UW Anthropology Department (10/13/23)
Posted: 9/29/2023 ()
The Department of Anthropology and CSDE are co-sponsoring the Sam Dubal Memorial Lecture. This year’s lecture will be given by Dr. Natali Valdez. Dr. Valdez’s talk is entitled “Weighing the Future: Race, Science and Pregnancy Trials in a Postgenomic Era.” The talk is on Oct. 13 from 1:30-2:50pm and will be online via zoom. Registration information can be found here.
Contemporary clinical trials selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, her book examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to racism, capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction.
Natali Valdez is a medical anthropologist and science and technology scholar who studies how race, gender, and power are enveloped into scientific knowledge production. She draws from Black feminism and postcolonial feminist science studies to critically examine epigenetic and postgenomic conceptions of the environment in social and biological (re)production. Her current and ongoing research interests include systemic racism, inter/transgenerational trauma, somatic therapy, big data, metabolic illness, and predictive medicine. She is an assistant professor at Purdue University, and this year she is a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University.
Date: 10/13/2023
Time: 1:30-2:50 PM
Deadline: 10/13/2023
Location: Online via Zoom