Event Description
Current large-scale studies selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. Weighing the Future is the first ethnography of ongoing prenatal trials in the United States and United Kingdom. Studying prenatal trials reveals larger processes of capitalism, surveillance, racism, and environmental reproduction in a postgenomic era. Valdez argues that science, and how we translate and imagine it, is a reproductive project that requires anthropological and feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, the book brings attention to how the present— the here and now—is at stake.
Event Speaker
Natali Valdez, Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required.
Hosted by the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture Project at Columbia University.
