Gabriela Morales,

Research interests: care; the body; the state; medicine and colonialism; health policies and institutions; indigeneity and race; occupational and environmental health; Bolivia; Latin America

Working at the intersections of medical and political anthropology, I write about health institutions and projects to transform health care provision in highland Bolivia. A central concern in my work is how institutional projects to improve care unfold amid enduring dynamics of colonial and capitalist extraction. I analyze the contradictions of care provision in biomedicine and public health, particularly as harm and help, sickness and cure, become bound up with one another. My scholarship traces these questions in different ways across two main projects. My first book, Decolonizing Medicine: Politics and Practices of Care in Bolivia (currently under review), centers on state-led efforts to decolonize the health care system during Evo Morales’s presidency in Bolivia. I highlight how a health policy focus on warm care and cultural inclusion ultimately extended (rather than challenged) longstanding colonial modes of intervention. I have also begun research on a second book project, provisionally titled Afterlives of Mining: Chronicity and Labor in the Bolivian Andes, that traces the historical relationship between mining and shifting approaches to environmental and occupational health in Bolivia. Focusing on the decay of hospitals and other social services once attached to mining centers, I consider how miners navigate care in a context where illnesses endure even when institutions do not.