Gabriela Morales,

Research interests: ethics of care; well-being; ontology; materiality; coloniality and decolonization; the state; Bolivia; Latin America

As a medical and a political anthropologist, I am broadly interested in how colonial and racializing logics have shaped medical care in Latin America — as well how such forms of intervention reach limits, are challenged, or are refused. I received my PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2017. At Scripps, I teach a range of classes on health and medicine, colonialism, and Latin American politics.

My current book manuscript, Decolonizing Medicine: Politics and Practices of Care in Bolivia, is an ethnography of care practices under Bolivian state efforts to decolonize health care services during Evo Morales’ presidency. In keeping with a wider national agenda of descolonización (decolonization), reformers proposed to recenter Indigenous knowledges and tackle the intertwined structures of colonialism and capitalism that underpinned an exclusionary health care system. Initiatives ranged from transforming biomedical practice to incorporating traditional healers and midwives into clinical services to developing participatory planning. In tracing the uneven — and sometimes contested — implementation of these national health policies, this book attends to everyday encounters (a conversation in a waiting room, an injection with a needle, a gift of food) to examine moves toward reckoning and repair in medicine.

My most recent work has shifted to focusing on questions of chronicity and embodiment in illness. I am currently in the early stages of a second book project on afterlives of mining in Bolivia. It traces the temporalities of illness resulting from mining against the backdrop of structural reforms, Indigenous and labor activism, and emergent environmental health paradigms.