Research Bio

Dr. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on social hierarchies, health disparities, and the ways in which perceptions of social difference naturalize and normalize these inequalities. He currently runs a European Research Council Project on food systems and migration as an ICREA Researcher at the University of Barcelona. Dr. Holmes, Chancellor's Professor (2022-2025) in the Division of Society and Environment, is investigating social hierarchies and health disparities in the context of US-Mexico migration as well as the ways in which these inequalities become understood to be natural and normal. This project draws on approximately eighteen months of full-time participant-observation, during which time Dr. Holmes migrated with undocumented indigenous Mexicans in the United States and Mexico, picked berries in Washington State, pruned vineyards in central California, harvested corn in the mountains of Oaxaca, accompanied migrant laborers on clinic visits, and trekked across the border desert into Arizona. Concurrently, he is conducting research into the processes through which medical professionals learn to perceive and respond to social difference. In addition, Dr. Holmes is leading a research group conducting investigating the ways in which connections between migrant farmworkers, supply chain workers, and consumers within transnational food systems in California, Spain and Germany become visible or invisible for different people at different times. This research group is especially intersted in the ways in which these connections relate both to health and health care in these societies.

Research Expertise and Interest

immigration and migration, medical anthropology with foci on social theory and ethnography, social studies of medicine and science, social difference related to race, social difference related to socioeconomic status, social difference related to citizenship, social difference related to gender, social difference related to sexuality, naturalization and normalization of social hierarchies and health disparities, social suffering and symbolic violence, urban and rural Latin America and North America, population health with focus on global health, population health with focus on health disparities, population health with focus on social determinants of health