Hello!
I am a cultural anthropologist, working as a postdoctoral lecturer at the University of Chicago's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Department of Anthropology. Previously, I held a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. Broadly speaking, I am interested in ethnographic questions of embodiment, materiality, knowledge, and the political with a geographic focus on Peru and the Americas. My work draws upon diverse scholarly fields, especially environmental and medical anthropology, science and technology studies, critical race studies, and political theory.
In 2015, I completed my PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Davis with a designated emphasis in critical theory. My PhD research examined how lead toxicity is operationalized politically within social projects that resist––or support–– Peru's large-scale extractive industries. I conducted 1.5 years of research at two emblematic sites of metal production and lead contamination in Peru: the Andean Metallurgic Center of La Oroya and the National Seaport of El Callao. My research found that while toxicological sciences deliver ethical weight to public health, human rights, and environmental activism, neoliberal labor reforms in Peru make human exposures to heavy metals a requisite to diverse forms of economic livelihood and collective survival. Contemporary antagonisms between labor and environment/health generate the analytical challenge of this project. Through an ethnographic examination of the social and material processes that bring bodies and minerals into relation, my work conceptualizes the politics of environmentalism, health, and human rights within the noxious environs of racial capitalisms and post-anthropocene worlds.
At the University of Chicago, I teach the pro-seminar for the M.A. and B.A. programs in Latin American and Caribbean studies as well as additional courses on cultures of extractivism, toxicity, social movements, and race, gender, and indigeneity. I am also the primary advisor of senior and master's theses in anthropology and Latin American Studies. Previously, I taught courses on the life politics of the Catholic Church, decolonial approaches to the study of science, technology, and medicine, environmental anthropology, and the anthropology of globalization.
I am a cultural anthropologist, working as a postdoctoral lecturer at the University of Chicago's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Department of Anthropology. Previously, I held a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. Broadly speaking, I am interested in ethnographic questions of embodiment, materiality, knowledge, and the political with a geographic focus on Peru and the Americas. My work draws upon diverse scholarly fields, especially environmental and medical anthropology, science and technology studies, critical race studies, and political theory.
In 2015, I completed my PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Davis with a designated emphasis in critical theory. My PhD research examined how lead toxicity is operationalized politically within social projects that resist––or support–– Peru's large-scale extractive industries. I conducted 1.5 years of research at two emblematic sites of metal production and lead contamination in Peru: the Andean Metallurgic Center of La Oroya and the National Seaport of El Callao. My research found that while toxicological sciences deliver ethical weight to public health, human rights, and environmental activism, neoliberal labor reforms in Peru make human exposures to heavy metals a requisite to diverse forms of economic livelihood and collective survival. Contemporary antagonisms between labor and environment/health generate the analytical challenge of this project. Through an ethnographic examination of the social and material processes that bring bodies and minerals into relation, my work conceptualizes the politics of environmentalism, health, and human rights within the noxious environs of racial capitalisms and post-anthropocene worlds.
At the University of Chicago, I teach the pro-seminar for the M.A. and B.A. programs in Latin American and Caribbean studies as well as additional courses on cultures of extractivism, toxicity, social movements, and race, gender, and indigeneity. I am also the primary advisor of senior and master's theses in anthropology and Latin American Studies. Previously, I taught courses on the life politics of the Catholic Church, decolonial approaches to the study of science, technology, and medicine, environmental anthropology, and the anthropology of globalization.
| graeter_s_cv2019.pdf |