Carole Browner

Research Professor
Department: Anthropology
browner@ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Latin America, Comparative Latin America

Carole Browner is a Research Professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology, the Department of Women’s Studies, and the Center for Culture and Health, within the David Geffen School of Medicine’s NPI-Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She served as Chair of the Anthropology Department from 2010 to 2013. Her training as a medical anthropologist combines a doctorate in socio-cultural anthropology with a master’s degree in public health.

Her research interests have lain principally at the intersection of gender, reproduction, and health. She has conducted field research in urban Colombia, rural Mexico, and with diverse ethnic groups in the U. S. In Cali, Colombia she investigated the circumstances that led pregnant women with unintended conceptions to seek illegal abortion. In rural Mexico, Professor Browner sought to understand how local political relations shaped gender-based reproductive strategies. Since 1989, She has worked mainly in the U. S. on issues surrounding the medicalization of pregnancy and prenatal care, particularly the ways that prenatal genetic information may alter reproductive experience. Her prize-winning collection, Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives (co-edited with Carolyn Sargent) was published in 2011 by Duke University Press. Professor Browner has also conducted fieldwork with indigenous and nonindigenous Mexican rural women on identity and social transformation and in a collaboration with an economist and an epidemiologist on Mexican health and pension policy reform.

Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Health Care Policy Research, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, private donors, and private foundations.