Bio:
Alberto Morales received his PhD in Anthropology (2019) from the University of California, Irvine and a BS in Biological Sciences also from the University of California, Irvine.
Morales works at the intersections of biotech sciences, multispecies relations, global health equity, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. His first book, Designs on Natureculture: Esperanza, Multispecies Collaboration, and Planetary Health, examines Latin American scientists’ political strategies to redress neglected, systemic issues of health, poverty, and environmental ruination through multispecies experiments on biodiversity. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Panamá, Designs on Natureculture examines biotech laboratory workers and government policy officials’ investments in science, technology, and innovation as sustainable forms of national development.
Morales draws on his interdisciplinary background in Latin American Studies, Medical and Environmental Anthropology, and Science, and Technology Studies to analyze how precarity, absence, and hope are lived and experienced in technoscientific communities across Latin America.
His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Newkirk Center for Science and Society. Morales has taught classes on medical anthropology; multispecies approaches to global health; science, technology, and race; Latinos in medical care; and Latinx and Latin American identities and social justice.
More recently, Morales has been experimenting with multi-modal ethnographic work, including sensory/sound methods, and with innovative digital pedagogy to push the possibilities of transmedia and epistemic modes of engagement in research and teaching. Prior to joining Drexel University, Alberto E. Morales was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Program for Latin American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.