Join Natali Valdez for her talk, "Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era".

Current large-scale studies selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. 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.

About the speaker

Natali Valdez is a medical anthropologist and assistant professor at Wellesley College. Her teaching and research attend to how logics of capitalism, racism, and gender binaries are enveloped into scientific knowledge production. She draws from Black feminism and postcolonial feminist science studies to explore the entanglements between science and society. Her research areas include reproduction, race/racism, environmental epigenetics, clinical trials, big data, metabolic illness, and predictive medicine.

Event Details
11am - 12:30pm, Monday 21 March
Venue: Room 4.69, level 4 RSSS Building