Chelsey R. Carter is a Black feminist anthropologist of medicine, public health, and race from St. Louis, Missouri. Her research takes an interdisciplinary lens to explore the ways structural inequities constrain the lives of Black people in the United States. Methodologically and theoretically, she draws on cultural anthropology (particularly Black feminist anthropology and medical anthropology), Black studies, Women, Gender, Sexuality and Queer studies, public health, and medicine to explore the contours of Black people’s experiences with neurodegenerative diseases (like ALS) and the consequences of anti-Black racism. Carter is interested in how the everyday experiences of Black patients, those often deemed inconsequential to doctors, may help us understand Black people’s relationships to their own subjectivities, space, survival, community and care. Her ethnographic dissertation project informs her first book project. Her forthcoming research projects investigate caregiving and ALS, medical cannabis and genomic research in Black communities (The Black Genome Project with Brett Maricque). Carter is a member Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective and co-Chair of the 2nd annual BFHSS Collaboratory.
Carter received her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with a minor in Spanish, receiving high honors from Emory University, where she was also a recipient of the Majorie Shostak Award for Excellence in Ethnographic Writing and the Heart of Emory award. Her scholarship has been recognized and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society and more. Her public and scholarly work has been published in Anthropology News, Scientific American, Museum Anthropology, Medical Decision Making, British Journal of Health Psychology, American Ethnologist, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly and more.
Carter is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and an affiliate in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology, a Master of Public Health, and a certificate in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2021, Carter was a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University in the Department of Anthropology.
