Karin Friederic, Ph.D.

I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. My research areas include medical anthropology, global health, transnational feminism, human rights, gender, violence, disability and chronic “contested” illnesses focusing on Latin America and Sweden.

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My primary research over the past twenty years has examined how transnational human rights and global health campaigns reconfigure gendered subjectivities, relationships, and ideas of citizenship and belonging in Latin America. My 2023 book, The Prism of Human Rights: Seeking Justice amid Gender Violence in Rural Ecuador (Rutgers University Press) documents the effects of human rights on local responses to intimate partner violence on Ecuador’s coast over the last twenty years. In it, I draw on two decades of research and activism to explore two facets of human rights—one, their contribution to the unfinished journey to justice for victims of gender violence, and two, their role in a global cultural project in which “rights” are associated with modernity, development, and democratic states.

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My scholarship aims to provide nuanced, in-depth analyses of the ways that power and violence rupture and rework social relations by exacerbating gender, class, and ethno-racial differences.  i examine not only how power and violence articulate to sustain and exacerbate gendered inequalities, but also how they shape the possibilities for crafting locally driven visions for gender justice. To achieve this, I integrate ethnographic methods with theoretical perspectives informed by historical political economy, transnational feminisms, critical medical anthropology, and critical development and human rights studies. I also draw from these modes of inquiry to highlight community-driven social processes that promote and restore dignity and well-being. These questions also inform my writing on charity versus justice, interrogating the limits of right frameworks and the insidious forms of neocolonial saviorism which render charity and giving visible, while obscuring the exploitation that make "giving" and "saving" possible (see Saving Stray Dogs and "Based on the Incredible True Story"). 

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My current research projects include (1) queer youth and alternative masculinities in rural Ecuador and (2) “Listening to Your Body”: Managing Chronic, Contested Illnesses in Sweden. While I remain committed to understanding how ideas of gender, identity, violence change in response to human rights-based policies and discourses in Ecuador, I am also pursuing new research on gender, illness, and interoception in Sweden, inspired in part by my own personal journey with chronic illness.

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My research has been published in diverse venues and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Feminist Review Trust, among others. I was thrilled to hold the 2015 Campbell Fellowship for Transformative Research on Women in the Developing World by the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I completed my MA and Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, and my BA in Anthropology from the Colorado College. ​