What an honor to receive a prize bearing Rachel Carson’s name, and to be in the company of scholars whose work I so deeply admire. Carson’s influence runs through my book—not only in my critique of the “elixirs of death” sustaining monocrop capitalism, but in my broader concern for the mechanics of social and political transformation. Mal-Nutrition examines how maternal nutrition interventions often perform change precisely to hold imperial power in place. The repeated failure of supplement science to ameliorate hunger is a predictable outcome of a narrow body- and nutrient-focused approach to nourishment. Following Carson, I ask us to look instead to ecologies, relations, and histories.
Mal-Nutrition is dedicated to mothers, broadly defined. I wrote much of it at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, amid daily reminders of how the institution of American motherhood offloads the work of caring for the future onto women while isolating them from the communities and stripping them of the resources needed for this work. It has been chilling to watch today’s authoritarian politicians double down on the nuclear model of family, eviscerating public services and reproductive autonomy that offer women life outside of subservient domestic roles. To counter this horror I take solace in an image that went viral during my fieldwork of Guatemalan mothers blocking a highway in political protest. The women are completely in control—not scared, or weak, or vulnerable. Nutrition is often used to undermine mothers’ community-building power, but mothers are powerful too.
I want to acknowledge Noel Solomons, the director of the Center for the Study of Sensory Impairment, Aging, and Metabolism (CeSSIAM) in Guatemala, who profoundly shaped my work. He died just as my book went to press. He would be so proud of this prize, and I wish I could have shared this news with him. I am certain that Rachel Carson would have appreciated his research, which drew attention to the influence of environmental pollution on human metabolism. His deep thinking taught me that change is slow, collective, and rooted in careful listening and integrity. It has been a gift to interact with the people he mentored in and outside of Guatemala, who carry on his legacy.
I am also thankful for my many feminist advisors and STS colleagues—especially those in Amsterdam whose companionship nurtured me from start to finish. And to the prize committee and the people at the helm of 4S: your commitment to honoring books in the field is a powerful service to knowledge production and all the relations that go into it. One of the clearest lessons I learned in fieldwork is that being part of good collectives matters. It is a great privilege to be part of this one.
Thank you! Muchas gracias!
Emily Yates-Doerr is an anthropologist at Oregon State University, where she works at the intersections of feminist science studies, food studies, and anthropology. Previous books include The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala (UC Press 2015) and the edited volume. The Ethnographic Case: Telling Stories, Shaping Knowledge (Mattering Press 2023). She is currently carrying out research on memories of nuclear weapons testing in the United States.
Emily Yates-Doerr. Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm, 2024. (University of California Press)
The Carson Prize is awarded to monographs that undertake a seemingly Sisyphean task: to write a book that is politically relevant, contributes scholarship to science and technology studies, and crucially, is written in an accessible way to communicate to broader audiences the importance of STS scholarship. This year, the Carson prize committee found Emily Yates-Doerr’s Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm (University of California Press) to be lucid and beautifully written, theoretically interesting and emotionally impactful, and an exemplar of a necessary and timely contribution, especially in the current political climate in the US and beyond, where violence so readily asserts itself over any pretense of care.
From ethnographic insights grounded in long-term, multi-sited research in indigenous Guatemalan communities of the Maya-Mam, the book brilliantly illustrates how assumptions of the interdisciplinary field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) that circulate in the areas of public health, medicine, human development, and biological anthropology—where environmental exposures in the “first 1000 days of life” including in utero are thought to permanently influence later health and socioeconomic status—are tied to imperial, intersecting logics of violence and care. The bloody thread of US violence in Guatemala, from the US government orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically-elected president to appease the United Fruit Company, to the Clinton-era policy of “Prevention Through Deterrence” that funneled migrants into inhospitable terrain to kill the most vulnerable, is inextricably tied to the USAID-led scientific studies on maternal nutrition. These studies portray the womb as a vacuum disconnected from the broader imperial production of hunger, war and ongoing colonization that continues three centuries of dispossession and indentured servitude under Spain.
As Yates-Doerr clearly states, harmful border policies, and sovereignty over land, agriculture and reproduction must be interwoven with nutrition policies to end hunger. In centering the easy-to-forget history and continuity of US imperialism in Guatemala, Yates-Doerr argues that the politics of knowledge that STS tends to be comfortable examining is always shaped by coercive power, where the kind of knowledge in circulation is ever-Machiavellian in its calculus of cruelty and manipulation. Through collaborative work with other scientists and ethnographic engagement with local forms of knowledge, the book also reveals the potential of STS work to help deflate or “slow down” the authority of (North American) nutrition science.
The book’s deep and broad ethnographic insights, combined with insights from history and political economy, constitutes a powerful way to demonstrate the 'mal' of nutrition science as it reaches women and communities. In doing so, Yates-Doerr contributes to STS scholarship in international development that examines the gendered violence of modern infrastructure projects. Yates-Doerr challenges us to consider the harms of well-intentioned organizations that reinscribe indigenous women through body- and nutrition-centered approaches into structures of scientific knowledge that disconnect women’s reproductive labor from the labor of growing and eating food, and the ability to lead a thriving life.
Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner. All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism, 2023. (Briston University Press).
The committee found this book to be wonderfully synthetic of existing scholarship to show different lineages of environmentalism—traditions and histories that are so often colonized by the Western ones—while contributing their own, all the while being very accessibly written. This is an excellent book in for classrooms.
Catherine D’Ignazio. Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. 2024. (The MIT Press).
The committee thought Counting Feminicide to be a brilliant example of putting STS concepts into practice. In a moment where hegemonic practices of knowing, producing and using data have so much power, the book is politically significant in how D’Ignazio traces how data is made and could be made otherwise. Counting Feminicide is also an accessible and effective toolkit that makes excellent use of graphics, and could be adopted by activists.
Amelia Fiske. Reckoning with Harm: The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia, 2023. (University of Texas Press).
Ilana Löwy. Viruses and Reproductive Injustice: Zika in Brazil, 2024. (Johns Hopkins University Press).
2025 Carson Prize Committee: Monamie Haines (Chair), Marko Monteiro, Emily Wanderer, and Emma Kowal.