Kara E. Miller PhD

Dr. Kara Miller is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Applied Anthropology, specializing in medical anthropology, body politics, and eco-social well-being. Dr. Miller’s work explores how bodily ways of knowing can enliven structures that affect and manage people’s lives, through investigations of health equity, utilizing holistic anthropological approaches in fieldwork and ethnography. Her work is informed by health humanities, feminist epistemologies, and critical social theory and is centered in theories of embodiment, which look to the visceral, enlivened aspects of experience in order to understand human complexities, contexts, and conditions. Dr. Miller’s work seeks to renovate healing systems and institutions with care and coherence generated through nuanced cultural understandings, and her methods are based in practices of empowerment.

Previous research in East Africa examines the embodied politics of health policies regulating women’s sexual and reproductive health. Other projects include: humanizing mental health systems in New Orleans; collaborative community work on access to health care for migrant communities in California; and facilitating a National Institutes of Health study in Uganda on integrative medicine. Dr. Miller’s current and emergent work looks at embodied ecology, particularly with regard to toxic industrial practices and avenues to community health sovereignty. Positing that the body is a vehicle for interacting with lifeworlds, as well as a lived site of accumulation and information, new work aims to understand local environmental entanglements and perceptions, and has implications for community-based ecological wellness and conservation medicine.