research overview
- Donna Goldstein is currently writing a book provisionally titled, 'Brazil's Nuclear Ambitions: From Cold War Science to Contemporary Populations at Risk' that considers Brazil's fifty-year investment in nuclear technologies as the focal point of inquiry, and explores the varied history of scientific processes and production that assembles into our contemporary framing. She has written extensively on the intersection of race, gender, poverty and violence in Brazil and is the author of the critically acclaimed Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (University of California Press 2013, 2003), winner of the 2005 Margaret Mead award for public anthropology. Professor Goldstein is working on a series of projects within the anthropology of science. She recently joined a public health project based at McMaster University (Canada) that tracked COVID-19 in 50 countries. She has written about pharmaceutical politics, bioethics, regulation, and neoliberalism in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, and is currently researching the history of Cold War science and nuclear energy in Brazil. She is interested in a range of case studies that involve late industrial toxicity and effects on public health and the environment. She has also written on gesture, politics and spectacle, political corruption, and Trump politics among other themes.
