Research

I am a qualitative researcher working across anthropology, gender studies, science and technology studies, and public health.

My research explores issues of race, gender, and power across broad scientific and biomedical fields including epigenetics, clinical trials, chronic illness, and reproduction.

My new book project titled Families in the Body: Narratives of Generational Trauma and Healing examines the stories we tell ourselves about how we get sick and how to feel better. Drawing on innovative ethnographic methods and self-experimentation, I examine the connections across generational trauma, epigenetic inheritance, and somatic therapies. Through mainstream dissemination of emergent science, patients/consumers are connecting their illnesses with the health impacts of inherited trauma carried in the body, and finding new ways to heal. This book tells a larger story about how individual and collective healing is tied to social liberation.

Publications

Book

• Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era – University of California Press, 2022

Selected Articles

• “Studying Up from the Margins” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 5/10/2023

• “The Politics of Postgenomic Reproduction: Exploring Pregnant Narratives from within a Clinical Trial” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 12/17/2021

• “Reproducing Whiteness: Race, Food, and Epigenetics” –American Anthropologist, 8/24/2020
  
• “Centering Race and Racism in Reproduction” – Natali Valdez & Daisy Deomampo, Medical Anthropology, 12/12/2019
  
• “Improvising Race: Clinical Trials and Racial Classification” – Medical Anthropology, 8/15/2019
  
• “The Redistribution of Reproductive Responsibility: On the Epigenetics of “Environment” in Prenatal Interventions” – Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2018
  
• “No Global Consensus: A Cross-Sectional Survey of Maternal Weight Politics” – Courtney Scott, Christopher T. Anderson, Natali Valdez, Francisco Mardones, Ellen A Nohr, Lucilla Poston, Katharina C Quack Loetscher, and Barbara Adams, BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 2014.

Book Reviews

• “Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals by Jill A. Fisher” – Journal of Cultural Economy, 9/30/2021

Online Publications and Blog Posts

• “#My(white)BodyMyChoice“ – Thesis Eleven, 7/14/2020, with Megan Warin
  
• “Epigentics and Methodological Limits“ – Society for Cultural Anthropology, 4/25/2019