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Contemporary clinical trials selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, Weighing the Future examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to racism, capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction. This groundbreaking book makes the case that science, and how we translate it, is a reproductive project that requires feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, this book brings attention to the present at stake.
If you request it through the UW-Madison library, you can access a digital copy of Natali Valdez’s Weighing the Future. If you request it now, it should be available in a couple of weeks. If your library can’t access the book digitally, you may contact Natali Valdez and ask her to send you a copy of the introduction.
For further reading:
Valdez, N. (2023), Studying Up from the Margins in a white-supremacist-cis-hetero-patriarchal-capitalist culture1. Med. Anthropol. Q.. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12765