Research Expertise and Interest

Latin America, Mexico, social and cultural anthropology, kinship, anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, post-colonial science, gender, queer studies

Research Description

Cori Hayden is a professor in the Department of Anthropology. Hayden's is a cultural anthropologist who works on the contemporary biosciences in the Americas and the U.K. Her work has primarily explored how claims to and about biological material and knowledge help shape contemporary social imaginaries of participation and marginalization. These questions shaped her earlier writings on reproductive technologies, kinship, and lesbian families in the US. They take expanded form in her recent ethnography of bioprospecting in Mexico, When Nature Goes Public, which tracks relationships among 'local' communities, public sector scientists, and drug companies involved in controversial benefit-sharing agreements. She is currently exploring the ethics and practice of clinical trials in Latin America, as well as the rise of an ethic of benefit-sharing in human genetic research. Together, these projects help her think about a number of intertwined concerns. She is interested in critical, ethnographically grounded approaches to intellectual property regimes, ethics, and other modes of governance; in developments in the emergent field of science studies in and of Latin America, and in how ideas of the public are constituted through the biosciences, both North and South.