Elyse Ona Singer, PhD
Anthropologist | Author | Educator
About Me
As a cultural and medical anthropologist, I study how people grapple with ethically extreme decisions about life and death. My work explores bioethical quandaries about when life begins and ends and who is authorized to draw these boundaries, engaging hard individual, communal, and societal questions such as: who has ownership over the body? What makes a person? And, who bears responsibility for nascent and depleted human life? These interests have led to two major ethnographic projects in Mexico on abortion politics and end-of-life care. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Association for University Women.In the fall of 2024 I'm starting a new position as Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas.
Lawful Sins
Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico
Winner of Arthur J. Rubel Book Prize, LASA
Honorable Mention Eileen Basker Memorial Book Prize, SMA
Honorable Mention Michelle Z. Rosaldo Book Prize, AFA
Honorable Mention Council on Anthropology & Reproduction Book Prize
Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, the book reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.
Remaking Mexican Death
Searching for Dignity at the Ends of Life
Current Project
With the support of a two-year Senior Research Award ($238,583) from the National Science Foundation and a Post-PhD grant ($20,000) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, I recently launched a new study. Situated across the palliative care wards of two major public hospitals in the Mexican capital, the study considers how terminally ill patients, their family members, and their palliative care providers strive to achieve a dignified death, and what bioethical and bureaucratic obstacles they encounter along the way.
Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Alicia Ordoñez Vázquez is working with me on this project.
Teaching
My Courses
Health, Healing, and EthicsBody, Power, Culture: Anthropological Approaches to the BodyBioethics, Biomedicine, BiotechnologyThe Politics of Life and DeathRegulating Reproduction: Morality, Politics, and (In)justiceIntroduction to Cultural Anthropology
In The Press
See my research in the news.
Contact Me
I look forward to connecting with you.
