Meet the EIA team

The Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene project brings together environmental, indigenous, biosocial, multispecies, gender and theoretical expertise in Medical Anthropology, to extend interdisciplinary engagement concerning how the Anthropocene epoch impacts on human health. Our group aligns interest and expertise in diverse fields of inquiry relevant to the embodied inequalities of the Anthropocene including gender, justice and power, indigenous health, well-being and sustainability.

 

Prof Sahra Gibbon 
Professor

UCL, UK

I am a medical anthropologist trained in the UK and based in the Anthropology Department at UCL. Much of my earlier work has focused on examining cultures of biomedicine in the UK and subsequently in Cuba and Brazil, with a particular focus on questions of gender, citizenship, public health and inequalities.

I have become increasingly engaged with how environmental exposures and contexts are being made relevant within different fields of science and medicine. I am committed to constructive interventions that ensure medical anthropology can better contribute to develop biosocial science not just in the context of research but also teaching and training.

I am currently engaged with collaborative research in Portugal, Netherlands, Brazil and the UK in this area focusing on birth cohort studies. As one of the UK and UCL co-leads for the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene project, I bring a commitment to wider cross-disciplinary discussion with a conviction also that exchange, dialogue and learning from and with different traditions of anthropology are essential. This project aligns long standing interests I have in contemporary histories of public health and social medicine in Latin America, the relationship between reproductive and environmental justice, and how chemical toxicities in food and wider environments dynamically constitute bodies and intergenerational dynamics as well as the politics of health.

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Dr Laura Montesi
CONAHCyT Researcher

CIESAS, Mexico

I am a binational, multilingual medical anthropologist working as a CONAHCyT (Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Technologías) researcher at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social), Mexico.

I have a fond interest in food and commensality and a deep concern about how capitalism reduces biodiversity expropriates local and indigenous food knowledge practices, and affects bodies, lives, and relationalities. As a social and medical anthropologist, I have been working in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, especially in rural areas with large indigenous populations, where I have documented the social suffering that chronic conditions, particularly diabetes mellitus, embody and express. My research interweaves culturally grounded lived experiences of health and disease with the workings of larger social forces. I am interested in the intersections of health, inequalities, and the everyday unfolding of violence.

Diabetes mellitus is the incarnated lens through which I recognise several social (hi)stories marked by and (un)making the Anthropocene. Diabetes is about food epistemicides, altered human and nonhuman metabolisms, toxicity and bodily disruptions, climate breakdown and dietary uncertainties. Yet, it is also about care, food activisms, defense of the land and the everyday nourishment of interspecies relationships. 

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Dr Ivana Teixeira
Postdoctoral Fellow

UFRGS, Brazil

I gained my doctorate in Social Anthropology in 2015 at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). My doctoral research was based in Brazil and France, examining the socio-cultural context of the development of therapeutic techniques that mobilise nature as a healing agent, especially the technological and epistemic changes in human and non-human practices, from a multispecies ethnography in the urban context of metropolises such as Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Paris. I then undertook postdoctoral research in Brazil dealing with technical changes in the biomedical system related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the work of nurses in Basic Public Health Units in an urban context. Then, I worked as a researcher in research projects focused on the responses of Indigenous and immigrant communities to the health control techniques managed by the Brazilian state.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in Medical Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology at UFRGS, as part of the international project titled Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene project, led by Prof. Sahra Gibbon a the University College London. As part of my commitments, I am examining the incorporation of health problems derived from the anthropogenic logic of the meat industry in the Pampa region in far south Brazil. 

My research interest concerns addressing how interactions between humans and non-humans incorporate the social and biological effects of neoliberal and colonialist logic in South America, as well as the emergence of new technical and ecological arrangements related to health issues and human and non-human relationships. 

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Dr Gabriela Martínez Aguilar
Job title

CIESAS, Mexico

I have a PhD in Regional and Technological Development from the Tecnológico Nacional de México, and since 2014 I have been documenting the field of traditional medicine and its healing practices in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, with the aim of highlighting the urgency for its legal protection from the perspective of “sui generis intellectual property” once the Mexican state recognises it in the Constitution to be exercised by practising and non-practising populations. I continued my research through a post-doctorate in Gender and Health in southern Mexico, coordinating the project “Database Prototype of Traditional Medicines in the Valley of Tlacolula de Matamoros, Oaxaca” which seeks to contribute to the processes of legal defence of Traditional Knowledge from the indigenous communities and from its holders: healers, midwives, herbalists. At the same time, I documented the local responses that traditional medicines, in their rural contexts, provided to face the different health challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic, after having been left out of government medical services.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones en Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, CIESAS, México, in which my interests to develop within the Anthropocene Project, seek to contribute from the perspective of Medical Anthropology, to the affectations that anthropocentric activity has been systematically causing in the life of rural societies, particularly to women and their families whose socioeconomic activities are linked to agricultural practices, and to investigate the impacts on their health through an interdisciplinary perspective.

Research lines: 1) Intellectual Property Associated with Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Expressions, 2) Traditional Medicine from the Gender and Health Approach.

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Prof Paola Ma. Sesia
Professor 

CIESAS, Mexico

I am a senior professor and researcher at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico. I am a medical anthropologist and public health specialist with a PhD in sociocultural anthropology (Univ. Arizona, USA, 2002), a Masters in Public Health (Univ. California, Berkeley, USA, 1987) and a BA in History (Univ. California, Berkeley, USA, 1982).

My research interests focus on reproductive health, maternal mortality, obstetric violence, midwifery, health policies and Indigenous peoples in Mexico. I also focus on the health impacts of the Anthropocene on populations living in structural vulnerability in Latin America. I carry out politically engaged research from human rights, social, reproductive and environmental justice, gender and pro-equality perspectives.

I have authored, co-authored or edited over 90 publications, including articles, book chapters and books. My recent publications (in English) include: ‘Critical Medical Anthropology: Perspectives from Latin America’ (2020, coedited with Gamlin, Gibbon and Berrio); ‘Global voices for global (epistemic) justice: Bringing to the forefront Latin American theoretical and activist contributions to the pursuit of the right to health’ (2023, Health and Human Rights Journal); and ‘Indigenous midwifery revisited in COVID-19 times. The making of global maternal health and some anthropological lessons from Southern Mexico’ (2024, Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health).

In the EIA project, my interests focus on the intersections between environmental and reproductive justice, toxicity and health, COVID and pandemics, and Indigenous people’s ontologies and health.

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Dr Jennie Gamlin
Associate Professor

UCL, UK

I am a medical anthropologist with a background in Latin American Studies (UNAM, Mexico), Demography and Health (LSHTM) and Global Health (PhD, UCL). Much of my formative academic years were spent in Mexico where I engaged closely with critical medical anthropologists, feminist anthropologists and critical and decolonial theorists.

My work has focused on explorations of health inequalities, gender and Indigeneity using the methods of feminist ethnography to understand power dynamics and the gendering of health inequalities particularly around maternal and reproductive health and gender violence. Theoretically I work from a critical position to add a political economy perspective to analysis and interpretation and link local health realities with global power dynamics. I seek to politicise data and findings so that these can be understood in relation to globalisation, colonialism and the coloniality of being, patriarchy and racialisation and articulate how these structures of power operate to maintain inequalities.

My current research is on the coloniality of gender in Indigenous Wixárika communities in northwestern Mexico, with whom I have worked since 2010. In collaboration with historians at CIESAS Occidente (Mexico) and Wixárika researchers I am examining historical and ethnographic evidence of contact between institutional representatives to understand how gendered social structures have altered over time. The Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene brings my work into conversation with multi-species ethnography, food production, reproductive and environmental justice and landscapes of inequality to consider how ontological questions and Indigenous knowledges can inform research protocols, policy and public understanding of the Anthropocene.

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Prof Ceres Victora
Professor

UFRGS, Brazil

I am a Professor in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and I lead the Center for Research in Anthropology of the Body and Health (NUPACS) at the same university. I have research and teaching experience in medical anthropology, with a focus on the following subjects: health inequalities, social suffering, violence, emotions, and disasters in the southernmost state of Brazil.

My studies among the urban poor, and with indigenous peoples living in urban centres, highlight how these groups experience the inequalities of the Anthropocene in their everyday lives. 

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Dr Nehla Djellouli
Lecturer

UCL, UK

I am a lecturer in Global Health at the UCL Institute for Global Health. I am a social scientist by background committed to bring people’s voices at the forefront of research, policies and programmes targeted at them.

As a qualitative methodologist, I have focused in my research on how health policies and programmes get implemented and with what impact (or lack of). My research areas include: maternal & newborn health, public involvement, HIV/AIDS, quality of care, major health service reconfigurations, mental health, COVID-19 and planetary health.

As part of the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene collaboration, I managed the project and led the design and development of the EIA website and learning tool.

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Prof Jean Segata
Professor

UFRGS, Brazil

I am a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), working in the graduate programs in Social Anthropology and Social and Institutional Psychology. I coordinate the Multispecies Anthropology Center and the Covid-19 Humanities Network MCTI, through which I develop and coordinate research on the unequal effects of critical health and environmental events.

Besides Brazil, my teaching and research experience includes periods as a visiting scholar in Argentina, at the National Center for Endemic-Epidemic Diagnosis and Research (CeNDIE, Ministry of Health) in 2017, and in the United States, at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University in 2018, and at the School of Public Health at Harvard University in 2024.

Currently, I also serve as an honorary professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London in England and I am a level 1D researcher at CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development of Brazil).

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Dr Maria Paula Prates
Lecturer

University of Oxford, UK

I am a Brazilian-Uruguayan social anthropologist working on health, illness and care subjects, who grew up in the Pampa biome in South America and was trained in Brazil (PPGAS/UFRGS) and France (LAS/EHESS). I joined the UCL Department of Anthropology to work as a Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology of the Anthropocene for the EIA project in 2021.

Throughout my career, I have been working with and among Indigenous Peoples in Lowland South America and on a long-term basis with the Guarani-Mbyá collectives of the Brazilian far south. I situate myself as an implicated anthropologist who has personal and political commitments to Indigenous Peoples’ rights in general and those of Indigenous women in particular. Indigenous ‘midwives’ or “those who bathe”, as say the Guarani-Mbyá, have been my main interlocutors since my bachelor thesis in Social Sciences; and, until now, most of my research projects are related to birthing practices and ontological questions concerning or raised by the encounters between biomedical and shamanic knowledge(s). Public health systems and how “culture” and “differentiated care” policies are put in practices and framed within them are also part of my research interests.

In recent years, after coordinating projects on covid-19, Tuberculosis and (re)productive health – and joining the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene project – I have been working with more emphasis on health inequalities and the incommensurability/compositions of Indigenous and biomedical understandings of life and health. The papers and the second book I am at the moment dedicated to are focused on demonstrating the intertwined connections between environmental devastation, the over-medicalisation of Indigenous women’s bodies and the obstetric violences occurring in hospital settings, such as non-consented episiotomies. Through slow-pace careful, deep, and long-term ethnographic studies, my work intends to make visible connections that only the handcraft gathering of ‘data’ along with trustful relations in the field makes possible to grab. I advocate for grounded ethnographic theories that pay serious attention to what matters for those we establish relations with as anthropologists.

My current projects are focused i) long-covid and the “white diseases” in the Anthropocene (Brazil), and ii) Indigenous women, climate change and extractivism (Argentina, Brazil and Peru).

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