Winner, 2015 Adele E. Clarke Book Award, ReproNetwork.
Honorable Mention, 2015 Michelle Rosaldo Prize for Best First Book in Feminist Anthropology, Association for Feminist Anthropology.
Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state.
Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.
COMING IN MARCH 2024 FROM NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pregnant at work
low-income workers, Power, and temporal injustice
A compelling analysis of social inequality through the perspective of pregnant, low-wage service workers.
Pregnant at Work examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers’ struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor—a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people’s time is less valuable than that of other people.
Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century.
Save 30% with code NYUAU30 at NYUPRESS.org
Save 30% with code NYUAU30 at NYUPRESS.org
other research and writing
This is just a sampling! Download my full CV here.
reproductive health in New york
COVID-19 Testing Site in Times Square, New York City." Photo by Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0.“Trading in Harms: COVID-19 and Sexual and Reproductive Health Disparities During the First Surge in New York State.” Social Science and Medicine (2023, co-authored with Dr. Rajani Bhatia).
In March 2020, New York City was the national epicenter of the novel coronavirus in the United States. This article draws on rapid qualitative research from July to October of 2020 with sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH) providers who served low-income people from racial and ethnic minority groups in New York State to examine their perceptions of the effects of COVID-related adaptations to care on healthcare access and quality.
Photo by Milan Nykodym, CC BY-SA 2.0.
“Race-ing Time: Clinical Temporalities and Inequality in Public Prenatal Care.” Medical Anthropology (2019).
Analysis of clinical temporalities, or the social organization of time in the clinic, offers insights into how racism coheres in pregnant bodies and institutions, with implications for health care experiences for patients and providers. Based on research at a public prenatal clinic, I argue that long patient wait-times and pressure on providers to speed up are temporal instantiations of the same racist structures that shape public health care in the US. Through these temporal experiences, racialized patient populations and staff who work in racialized systems of public health care encounter the lesser value assigned to their time, bodies, and labor.
anthropology and the politics of abortion
Bans Off Our Bodies NYC. May 14, 2022. Photo by Rhododendrites, CC BY SA 4.0.
“Introduction,” After Roe. Cultural Anthropology Hotspots (2022, with Drs. Risa Cromer, Heather Paxon, Carolyn Sufrin, and Lucy van de Wiel). *OPEN ACCESS*
On June 24, 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a conservative supermajority of the US Supreme Court overturned the court’s rulings in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), disregarding 49 years of US legal precedent recognizing abortion as a medical procedure protected from “interference by the State” under a Constitutional right to privacy. The legal implications of this ruling, and the cultural and political responses it provokes, will continue to unfold for years, even generations, to come: as Laura Briggs (2017) instructs, all politics have become reproductive politics. At this critical moment of upheaval, anthropologists have much to say about how the United States got here, where it may be headed, and how the US case looks and resonates elsewhere in the world.
"'Sign during Women’s March, Washington DC., 2017" Photo by Nadine Fernandes.
““I’m Building a Wall Around My Uterus”: Abortion Politics and the Politics of Othering in Trump’s America.” Cultural Anthropology (2019). *OPEN ACCESS*
After Donald Trump’s inauguration, I sent an email to friends soliciting photographs to accompany a then-forthcoming article on abortion rights in the United States.. Of the many compelling images, one caught my eye. A woman stands on a subway platform on her way to a protest march, holding a sign proclaiming: “I’m building a wall around my uterus and making the GOP pay me back.” It’s funny—a witty critique of the administration’s position on reproductive rights and migration policy, as well as of its deeply transactional approach to domestic and international diplomacy.
On Cuba
“On the Malecón. Havana in 2018.” Photo by Elise Andaya.
“Life and Time After Fidel.” Anthropology News (2017). *OPEN ACCESS*
What does the future hold for Cubans who came of age with the revolutionary state?
On November 25, 2016, Fidel Castro passed away. As Cuba’s Commander-in-Chief from 1959 until 2008, he survived the tenures of ten US presidents, from Eisenhower to Obama. Against a global display of emotions from mourning to jubilation, the Spanish newspaper, El País, declared, “Fidel, the last revolutionary, is dead.” The next morning, I received an anguished email from a friend on the island. Celia wrote, “We have lost our leader, and the silence on the streets of Havana is monstrous. It’s as if time has stopped.” If the last revolutionary is dead, what does this mean for generations living today and those yet to come?
“Family Doctor Clinic, Havana.” Photo by Elise Andaya.
“The Gift of Health: Socialist Medical Practice and Shifting Material and Moral Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2019).
In both official ideology and in daily practice, the moral economy of ideal socialist medicine is based on an ethos of reciprocal social exchange—that is, the gift—that informs not only doctors’ relationships with the Cuban state and with individual patients but also the state's policies of international medical service to developing nations. The social and economic upheavals after the fall of t Soviet Union, however, have compelled both the state and individual doctors to operate in a new local and global economy. The gift remains the central metaphor of Cuban medical practice. Nonetheless, as ideologies and practices of gifting and reciprocity encounter an emerging market economy, gifts—whether on the level of the state policies of international humanism or in patient–doctor relations—are open to new significations that highlight the shifting material and moral economies of post-Soviet Cuba.