Stefanie Graeter

Stefanie Graeter is a cultural anthropologist interested in ethnographic questions of embodiment, materiality, knowledge, and the political with a geographic focus on Peru and the Americas. She earned her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis in 2015 with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory.

Dr. Graeter's current book manuscript examines how lead toxicity operates politically within social projects that resist––or support–– Peru's transnational extractive industries. Tentatively titled,  Mineral Incorporations: Toxicity and the Alchemy of Politics in Peru, the book draws from 20 months of fieldwork at the Port of El Callao and the Metallurgic Center of La Oroya, where she conducted research in dialogue with Catholic scientists and public health workers, environmental NGOs, metal workers, corporate reps, state officials, and lead-exposed community members and local leaders. Dr. Graeter argues in the book that while toxicological sciences give ethico-epistemic teeth to activism,  eco-political work remains stymied by racialized neoliberal labor regimes that successfully wed toxic exposures to the economic livelihoods of some of the nation's most marginalized citizens. By ethnographically detailing the social and material processes that bring bodies and minerals into relation, the book conceptualizes the contemporary limits of environmental, health, and human rights politics within the noxious environs of racial extractive capitalisms and post-anthropocene worlds. To supplement her writing, Dr. Graeter completed a collaborative community film that documents parts of this research, The Lead Zone, viewable via her website.

Before starting at UA, Dr. Graeter held the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine and the Science in Human Culture Postdoc at Northwestern University, and also lectured for the University of Chicago's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Department of Anthropology. At the University of Arizona, Dr. Graeter's teaching will emphasize medical anthropology and political ecology and thematics of health and environment in Latin America.

2020-2021 Courses:

Fall 2020: Environment and Conflict in Latin America
                   Political Ecology (School of Anthropology)

Spring 2021: Latin American Health

Dr. Graeter is also an intersex person.  She contributes to global advocacy efforts to make intersex life and experience more visible to the public and to fight to end harmful social discrimination and medical practices inflicted upon intersex people and their bodies. There is nothing wrong with being intersex. At UA, she extends allyship and support to fellow members of the LGBTIQA+ community.