Amy Krauss

Amy Krauss received her PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2016. Before joining the Pozen Center, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Health Program at Princeton University. Her research and teaching interests focus on legal and medical anthropology; gender, embodiment and political practice; and postcolonial feminist theory and ethnography with regional focus in Mexico, Latin America, and the U.S.  

Her book project, Counterpoints of Care: Abortion Law and Feminist Worldmaking in Mexico City, is an ethnography of the politics of care that emerge across rivaling jurisdictions of abortion rights and criminalization in Mexico. In 2008, Mexico City inaugurated a public health program for the “Legal Interruption of Pregnancy,” while the majority of the other 31 states made laws in line with the Catholic Church to protect “life at the moment of conception.” The book draws on long-term ethnographic research to examine how polarized regimes of law produce and sustain institutional inequality and intensify moral ambiguity in clinics. Working with a feminist accompaniment project that provides support to women seeking safe abortion between states, the book traces the bodily, and often uncertain relations of care through which people imagine reproductive life and ethics in a context of conflicting norms and precarity.

At the University of Chicago, she taught courses on pain, expression, and the politics of empathy, and on reproductive rights and justice movements in Latin America and the U.S.

Read more about Amy’s teaching and published work.