Stefanie Graeter
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 current book manuscript examines how lead toxicity operates politically within social projects that resist––or support–– Peru's transnational extractive industries. Tentatively entitled Mineral Incorporations: Lead Toxicity and the Chemistry of Politics in Neoextractive Peru, forthcoming in 2027 with the University of California Press. 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.
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 Digital Extraction; 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 emphasize medical anthropology and political ecology and thematics of health and environment in Latin America
Courses Taught
Anth 307 Ecological Anthropology
Anth/Pol 424 Political Ecology
LAS/Anth 308 Health, Harm, and Healing in Latin America and the Caribbean
LAS/ANTH 422/522 Health Beyond Borders in Latin America and the Caribbean
LAS/ANTH/POL 348 Drug Wars and Oil Fortunes
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.