Profile
Dr. Saudi Garcia is a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2022-24) and incoming Assistant Professor (2024-) at The New School's Department of Anthropology. She is a writer, ethnographic researcher and social transformation practitioner who theorizes racial capitalism and ecological crisis from her social location as an Afro-Caribbean queer feminist and first-generation immigrant. Deeply concerned with all Caribbean people’s relationships to land, ecology and environmental health in the midst of the climate crisis, Dr. Garcia’s dissertation focused on the modern history of gold mining and tailing dam development in the Dominican Republic. She examined the contemporary health effects and forms of resistance to gold mining, ecological destruction and water scarcity through a framework attentive to how Black rural Dominicans draw on ancestral knowledge to refuse toxicity as an embodied manifestation of racial hierarchy.
Dr. Garcia is a graduate of Brown University, New York University’s Department of Anthropology and its Culture and Media program. She is a practicing documentary filmmaker, and volunteers as a facilitator for the Dominican-Haitian peace and reconciliation organization In Cultured Company.
Degrees Held
Ph.D, New York University, 2022
M.Phil, New York University, 2019
B.A., Brown University, 2014
Professional Affiliation
American Anthropological Association
American Ethnological Society
Society for Medical Anthropology
Latin American Studies Association (LASA) D.R.-Haiti Section
Association of Black Anthropologists
Dominican Studies Association
Non-Academic Other:
In Cultured Company
Recent Publications
Garcia, S. (2021) “Knowledge Production, Toxic Corporate Capital and the Anthropologist’s Entangled Ethics.” Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC) Blog
Jones, D. Adams, V. & Garcia, S. (2021) “Climate Disasters and Global Social Medicine.” The Art of Medicine Global Social Medicine Series, The Lancet.
Performances and Appearances
Films
“Making Haven” (Producer, Director & Editor, 16 mins) -- 2018
Tenants in Mott Haven, the Bronx stage the takeover of their neglected apartment building with a little-used legal procedure. “Making Haven” highlights the everyday labor of organizing as a path to community building and personal growth for New Yorkers mobilizing for the right to stay in their homes.
"A SEAT AT THE TABLE: 1969 and the Legacy of Black Psychiatrists" (videographer)
Film commemorating fiftieth anniversary of the Black psychiatrist “walk-in” that resulted in the creation of the Black Psychiatrist Association and Minority Psychiatry within the American Psychiatric Association (APA). (Interviewer and Cinematographer, 2018).
Trailer: https://player.vimeo.com/video/336717560
Research Interests
Racial capitalism, biopolitics, materiality; extractivism, mining, public health, toxicity, waste, water; Black feminist anthropology, rural feminism, agrarianism, social movements, Afrolatinx Geographies, decolonial and Black political theory, abolition, networks of care, mutual aid, reparations, abolition.
Recent histories of science, medicine and ecology nexus (i.e. environmental health, climate change and health).
Awards And Honors
Hemispheric Institute Mellon Graduate Fellowship, 2021
Inaugural LASA Haiti-DR Section Graduate Fellow, 2021
City University of New York Dominican Studies Library Research Fellowship, 2018
NYU Department of History Jerrold Seigel Fellowship in Intellectual History, 2018
Society for Visual Anthropologists Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship, 2017
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Travel Award 2016
NYU Center for Latin American Studies Tinker Research Fellowship, 2016
Henry M. McCracken Graduate Studies Fellowship, 2015
Brown University Cogut Center for the Humanities Undergraduate Fellowship, 2013
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship, 2012