Liz Roberts
Assistant Professor RC Department: Science, Technology, and Society lfsrob@umich.edu
Office: 214 Tyler Office hours: Wed - 12:30-1:30
Elizabeth Roberts investigates how biotechnologies and their bodily practice destabilize and remake Enlightenment dichotomies between matter and spirit, subject and object, love and money, religion and politics, nature and culture. She is currently developing these themes in her book manuscript, God’s Laboratory: Relations and Religiosity in Ecuadorian In Vitro Fertilization, an ethnographic examination of the experience of women, parents and medical practitioners involved with assisted reproduction in Ecuador. Her other projects include; a study of medical migrations – the movement across borders in search of health and life; and collaborative research on the vast changes in legal and social practice around reproductive and life politics in Latin America today. Her teaching includes the critical study of medicine, science and technology, reproduction, population, gender, race, religion, ethnographic methods and Latin America.
Recent Courses
RC SSCI 360: Social Theories of Medicine, Science and Technology
Anthropolgy 558: Science and Modernity
Selected Articles
2008 “Biology, Sociality and Reproductive Modernity in Ecuadorian In-Vitro Fertilization.” In Making Biosociality: Biologies and Identities in Formation, Sahra Gibbon, Carlos Novas eds., Routledge
2007 “Extra Embryos: Ethics, cryopreservation and IVF in Ecuador and elsewhere.” American Ethnologist. 34/1, 188-199.
2006 “God’s Laboratory: Religious Rationalities and Modernity in Ecuadorian In-Vitro Fertilization.” Culture Medicine and Psychiatry. 30/4, 507-536.