Research Bio
Laura C. Nelson is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, and an Associate Dean of Social Sciences. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford, and holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley with a focus on housing and community economic development. Her research interests focus on accidental non-normativity: the lives of people who by happenstance escape the normative expectations of society. She has two current research projects. One is a study of breast cancer as a medical, cultural, personal, environmental, political and transnational phenomenon in South Korea. The other focuses on the impacts of demographic factors on South Korea's social, cultural, and political developments. These demographic factors include the unremembered population of unmarried women in the post-Korean-war decades, the effectiveness of family planning programs in the 1960s and 1970s, the unbalanced birth ratio of boys and girls in the last decade of the twentieth century, and the current era of ultra-low fertility. Her first book, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (Columbia University Press, 2000) utilized ethnographic and media materials to examine ways how institutions shaped consumer culture in pursuit of national goals during the period 1960-1997. The text examines the response of South Koreans, particularly women, in various social positions as political conditions and consumer oriented messages evolved, and how this contributed to gendered distinctions themselves. Before joining the GWS faculty in 2013, Laura taught for eleven years in the Anthropology Department at California State University, East Bay, where she served as chair from 2008-2013. In addition to her academic positions, Laura’s career includes work in applied anthropology in the US: public policy evaluation, microenterprise development, and building employment linkages to poorly-connected communities.
Research Expertise and Interest
gender and medicine and politics, breast cancer in South Korea, cultural impacts of ultra-low fertility, demographic undertow, structures on cultural temporality and anti-poverty policies in the U.S. and South Korea
