Gender & Women's Studies

Ruth Goldstein

Position title: Assistant Professor of Gender & Women's Studies

Email: ruth.goldstein@wisc.edu

Pronouns: she/her/hers
Curriculum Vitae

I am broadly interested in the gendered aspects of human and nonhuman health, a quickly heating planet and environmental racism. My current book project Life in Traffic: Women, Plants, and Gold Along the Interoceanic Highway examines the socio-environmental consequences of transnational infrastructure projects and climate change along Latin America’s recently constructed thoroughfare, La Interoceánica, with a particular focus on intersections of race and indigeneity, cis and trans women’s health and “earth” rights in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. My subsequent research on mercury as a global pollutant, analyzes the racialized weight of toxic body burdens and impacts on maternal/fetal health.

Courses:

Gen&WS 533: Race, Gender, Botany
Gen&WS 539: Queering Ecofeminism
Gen&WS 339: Environmental Impacts on Maternal/Fetal Health

Select Publications:

2022. Pre-COP4.2 Side Event: Diálogo intercultural sobre Mercurio, Minería, Salud y Derechos colectivos, March 8, 2022

2022. “Multispecies Traffic, Infrastructure and Empire in Latin America.” LASA Forum 53(2): 14-20.

2022. “Life in Traffic: riddling fieldnotes on the political economy of ‘sex’ and nature.” Cultural Anthropology 37(2): 251-285. DOI: 10.14506/ca37.2.08

2021. “Etnobotânicas da Recusa: metodologias de engajamento com a resistência humana-implantada.” Ilha Revista de Antropologia 2(3): https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8034.2021.e80434

2020. “Mercury’s Toxic Touch.” Anthropology News website, October 2, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1514

2020. “Ayahuasca and Arabidopsis: The Philosopher Plant and the Scientist’s Specimen.” Ethnos.

2020. “Digamos Adiós al Mercurio”: Activos Tóxicos y Extracción Neocolonial.” Toxic News.

2020. “Making Mercury History: Toxic Assets and Neocolonial Extraction.” Toxic News.

2019. “Ethnobotanies of Refusal: Methodologies in Respecting Plant(ed)-Human Resistance.”Special Issue on Plant Ethnography, Anthropology Today 35(2): 18-22.

2018. “Consentimiento y Sus Discontentos: Género, Indigeneidad, y Extractivismo enMadre de Dios, Péru.” InGénero, sexualidades y mercados sexuales en sitios extractivistas de América Latina. Edited by Susanne Hofmann and Melisa Cabrapan Duarte. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Press, pp: 237-266.

2017. “Collaborations: Envisioning an Engaged Future for Anthropology” with Patricia Alvarez and Ugo Edu. History of Anthropology Newsletter.

2015. “Semiophors and Sexual Systems: The Circulation of Words and Women.” Pragmatics and Society 6(2): 217-239.

2014. “Consent and Its Discontents: On the Traffic in Words and Women.” Latin American Policy 5(2): 236-250.

 

Publications