Stefanie Graeter
Office Hours: By appointment
About 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 first book, Mineral Incorporations: An Ethnography of Lead in Peru, is forthcoming in 2027 with the University of California Press. The monograph examines how lead toxicity operates politically within social projects that resist––or support–– Peru's transnational extractive industries. By ethnographically detailing the social and material processes that bring bodies and minerals into relations of toxicity and also care, the book conceptualizes the limits of health and environmental politics to upend the racialized inequalities of contemporary extractive capitalism. To supplement her writing, Dr. Graeter completed a collaborative community film that documents parts of this research, The Lead Zone, viewable via her website.
For an updated list of publications: https://www.stefanietoneygraeter.com/writing.html
Dr. Graeter is currently exploring several new research directions for short- and long-term projects, including: Peru's oxygen economies during the CoVid-19 pandemic; Migrating climates of the Sonoran sky islands and Coastal Peru; On/Offshoring of Digital Extractivisms; and Intersex Kinship and Eugenics.
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 emphasizes medical anthropology and political ecology and thematics of health and environment in Latin America.
Dr. Graeter is also an intersex person. She contributes to advocacy efforts on and off campus to make intersex life more visible to the public and to end harmful medical practices and social discrimination. There is nothing wrong with being intersex. At UA, she extends allyship and support to fellow members of the LGBTIQA+ community.
Courses Taught
Anth 307 Ecological Anthropology
LAS/Anth 308 Health, Harm, and Healing in Latin America and the Caribbean
LAS/ANTH/POL 348 Drug Wars and Oil Fortunes
LAS/ANTH 422/522 Health Beyond Borders in Latin America and the Caribbean
Anth/Pol 424 Political Ecology
ANTH 696B Bodies of the Anthropocene
Areas of Study
Intersections of Health, Environment, and Human Rights; Peru (Lima, El Callao, La Oroya and the Mantaro Valley); Epistemic Politics of Toxicity; Science and Activism; (Neo)-Extractivism and Political Economy; Race and Capitalism; climate adaption in the Sonoran sky islands; multi-species STS; intersex kinship.