Rayna rapp biography sample

Quick facts for kids Rayna Rapp
Born
Other names	Rayna R. Reiter (pen name)
Education	Ph.D., University of Michigan, anthropology, M.A., University of Michigan, anthropology, B.S., University of Michigan, anthropology (with honors),
Occupation	Anthropologist professor
Scientific career
Institutions	New School for Social Research () New York University (present)

Rayna Rapp (pen name Rayna R.

Reiter) is a professor and associate chair of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; science, technology, and genetics; and disability in the United States and Europe. She has contributed over 80 published works to the field of anthropology, independently, as a co-author, editor, and foreword-writing, including Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent's Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge. Her book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, received multiple awards upon release and has been praised for providing "invaluable insights into the first generation of women who had to decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of amniocentesis result".

She co-authored many articles with Faye Ginsburg, including Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship, a topic the pair has continued to research.

Education and career

Rapp received her PhD from the University of Michigan in after completing her Bachelor's (with honors) and master's degrees from , each in Anthropology.

After obtaining her PhD, Rapp continued her academic career at the New School For Social Research from , where she chaired the Anthropology department and founded and chaired the Graduate Program in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory.

Rayna rapp biography sample The tasks of a feminist critical ethnography, Rayna Rapp tells us, are to document the sociocultural and economic contexts of power and marginalization, to engage in translational work linking diverse forms of experience and knowledge, and, most of all, to remember Rapp , Older Post Syed Raza. Annual Reports. In other projects.

She published Testing Women, Testing the Women in after fifteen years of field work during her time there. In , Rapp became a professor of Anthropology at New York University, acquiring the role of Associate Chair of the Department in She served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association from

Rapp has spoken at multiple universities and conferences around the United States and Europe, including the University of Texas at Austin, University of Kentucky, and the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

Rapp has also acted as mentor and advisor to feminist anthropologists Khiara Bridges and Elise Andaya.

Rapp believes "there is 'a widening chasm' between the medical-scientific utopian dreams of human perfectibility and the public's understanding of human diversity and impairment".

Her work in both genetics and reproduction has resulted in extensive research into multiple reproductive technologies, including amniocentesis and non-invasive prenatal diagnosis tests. Rapp stresses the "highly stratified and gendered benefits and burdens" these types of technologies carry and the audience they are marketed to. Rapp has extended this work to examine how human disability intersects with prejudice, diversity, and "discrimination based on racial-ethnic, class, national, religious, and gendered backgrounds".

Her current project is projected to concern the relationships between neuroscience, disability, neurodiversity, familial structures, and activism.

Work with Faye Ginsburg

Rapp's work with long-time coauthor Faye Ginsburg focuses on disability, reproduction, science, and social structures. Their most recent work, "'Not Dead Yet': Changing Disability Imaginaries in the 21st Century" examines the continuation of eugenic thinking and how it intersects with disability and public consciousness.

Free biography sample Toward An Anthropology of Women. Rayna likes to emphasize the brilliant theoretical contributions of this budding scholar. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Download as PDF Printable version.

The pair have also explored "disability consciousness and cultural innovation in special education". Rapp and Ginsburg's previous work, Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction brought together multiple articles with the purpose of placing reproduction at the center of social theory.

In that collection, Ginsburg and Rapp recall Shellee Colen's idea of "stratified reproduction", which they define as: "The power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered." Karen-Sue Taussig identifies the importance of reproduction in anthropology and points out the highly gendered nature of this discipline: in the collection, 28 of the pieces are by females with 2 male co-authors.

Carolyn Sargent has praised the collection for "effectively [tracing] the intersections between global dynamics and local cultural logic and social relations." Similarly, anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd claimed that the work "marks the maturation of the anthropology of reproduction" and identified it as one of the most important works in the field of reproductive anthropology at the time.

Honors and awards

• –15 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
• "Engendering the Field: a Story of Contingency" Distinguished Lecture/ plaque (AAA)
• GAD Centennial Distinguished Lecture, American Anthropological Association
• Diana Forsythe Prize, Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing
• Basker Book Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology
• Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society
• Staley Prize, School of American Research