Ruth Goldstein received her Masters in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 and her PhD from the joint medical anthropology program at the Universities of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco in 2015. Her scholarly interests stem from over ten years of examining human rights and environmental issues. Her Master research examined ethnobotanical practices in Costa Rica related to pharmaceutical development and biopiracy. Her doctoral research analyzed the socio-environmental consequences of transnational infrastructure projects and climate change along Latin America’s recently constructed Interoceanic Road, with a particular focus on sex-trafficking, intersections of race, women’s health and human rights in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. Her book, developed from her doctoral research: “The Traffic in Women, Plants, and Gold: Along the Interoceanic Road in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia” will be published by the University of California Press Series: Nature, Science, Politics. Goldstein’s newest research project traces how mercury carries a racialized valence defining migrant labor populations, often indigenous, as socially, mentally, and physically contaminated in California crop-fields and Amazonian gold mines.
After working as college fellow at Harvard University in the Folklore and Mythology program and an affiliate in Anthropology, she joined the faculty in Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
