Dr. Carina Heckert
Carina Heckert is a medical anthropologist with research interests in global health, maternal health, gender and sexuality, immigration, and ethnographic research methods. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Latino Center for Leadership Development at Southern Methodist University. Broadly, her research focuses on how policies shape illness experiences and experiences seeking healthcare. Her first book, Fault Lines of Care: Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia (Rutgers University Press, 2018), focuses on the ways that the system of HIV care itself generates gaps in who accesses services and under what circumstances and the ways that people experience care, stay in care, fall out of care, or avoid seeking care.
Since 2018, her research has explored the ways policies generate maternal harm for Latinas in the US-Mexico border region during pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period. The border city of El Paso, TX has experienced overlapping sociopolitical crises related to the enactment of immigration and border policies, one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history, and a COVID-19 death rate that was significantly higher than other major cities. Her work explores how these crises become embodied through various forms of maternal harm. Her second book, Birth in Times of Despair: Reproductive Violence on the US-Mexico Border (New York University Press, 2024), is based on this research.
Professor Heckert also regularly provides mentored research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students to gain research and publication experiences. In 2020, she received the American Anthropological Association’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.
UTEP Faculty Profile