Cori Hayden, Associate Professor

Anthropology, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

Anthropology of science, technology, and medicine; Latin America (particularly Mexico); post-colonial science studies; kinship, gender, and queer studies.

Profile

I am a cultural anthropologist and I work on the contemporary biosciences in the Americas and the U.K. My 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 my earlier writings on reproductive technologies, kinship, and lesbian families in the US. They take expanded form in my 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. I am 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 me think about a number of intertwined concerns. I am 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.

Representative Publications

2003. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

2003. “From market to market: Bioprospecting’s idioms of inclusion.” American Ethnologist 30 (3):359-371.

2003. “Suspended animation: A brine shrimp essay.” In Margaret Lock and Sarah Franklin, eds., Animation and Cessation: The Anthropology of Life and Death. Santa Fe: School of American Research.

1998. "Hybrid Knowledges: Mexico's Niche in the Biodiversity Marketplace." In Heins, Goerg and Flitner, eds., Politik der Natur: Neue Konflikte um Biologische Ressourcenì (Politics of Nature: New Conflicts over Biological Resources), pp. 215 - 232. Frankfort, Germany: Verlag, Leske & Budrich.

1997. "A Biodiversity Sampler for the Millennium." In Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragoné, eds., Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Change., pp. 173-206. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1995. "Gender, Genetics, and Generation: Reformulating Biology in Lesbian Kinship," Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1 (February):41-63.