Amy Krauss

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University (2017)
• BA, Social Thought and Political Economy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2006)

Research

My teaching and scholarship have evolved from interdisciplinary conversations between Latin American and Caribbean social movements, anthropology of the state, Marxist and abolition feminisms, medical anthropology, and postcolonial studies of law.  My first book project examines racial reproductive governance and feminist movements for healthcare access and justice in Latin America and the U.S. It draws on collaborative ethnographic research with acompañantes for abortion—companions, doulas, and care givers in Mexico—to consider how they imagine collective autonomy beyond state discourses of rights and criminalization. Writing from this project has been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, American Anthropologist, Revista Direito GV, Feminist Theory, and Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. 

I am in the earliest stages of two other research projects. The first explores colonial connections between Canadian extractive industry in BC and Colombia and the ways that environmental loss and displacement are addressed in healthcare reform and medicine. Another project traces the habits of a nurse’s body through her accounts of chronic pain and desire for anesthesia (painlessness).

Interests

Feminist legal and political theory; reproductive body, labor, and futurity; politics of illness and disability; history of medicine and aesthetics; lifemaking, death, and dying; ethnography and poetics; social justice research methods

Within the Labour Studies Program, I’m especially interested in gendered and racialized labor histories that fall outside classic interpretations of organized worker struggle, resource extraction and displacement, antiwork theory, social reproduction in racial capitalism and the politics of care work.

Biography

I am originally from a rural town outside of Ithaca, New York. Before pursuing a PhD, I studied with unemployed workers in La Matanza, Argentina who were building a community bakery and debating how to sustain a broader movement against neoliberal capitalism. After returning to the U.S., I worked as a counselor in an outpatient mental health program for recently de-institutionalized people in Western Massachusetts. Both experiences led me to graduate school for anthropology with the hopes of making relationships differently than those that reproduce empire and institutional systems of carceral care. Before joining the faculty at SFU as a guest in Coast Salish territory, I held postdoctoral fellowships and teaching positions at Princeton University, University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.  

Prior Courses

• Feminist Jurisprudence
• Critical Theories of Reproduction
• Reproductive Justice: Transnational and Global South Perspectives
• Pain and Representation
• Medical Humanities
• Critical Perspectives in Global Health

Publications

Special Issue: Beyond a lust for law: contesting antiabortion politics between Latin America and the U.S, Differences: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, co-edited with Penelope Deutscher (forthcoming, spring 2026)

“Archaeologies of the Body” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023)

“Legal Guerilla” (Direito FGV, 2023)

“Luisa’s ghosts: haunted legality and collective expressions of pain.” (Medical Anthropology: Cultural Studies of Health and Illness, 2020)

“Ephemeral Politics of Feminist Accompaniment Movements in Mexico City” (Feminist Theory, 2019)

Find writing, syllabi, and other projects here:

https://sfu.academia.edu/AmyKrauss