Karin Friederic

Associate Professor

336.758.5976

friedeku@wfu.edu

Piccolo 120

CV

Cultural/Applied Anthropology

Dr. Friederic is currently on research leave for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Karin Friederic is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. Her research areas include medical anthropology, global health, transnational feminism, human rights, gender, violence, disability and chronic “contested” illnesses focusing on Latin America and Sweden.

Karin’s primary research over the past twenty years has examined how transnational human rights and global health campaigns reshape family relations, gendered subjectivities, and experiences of violence in Latin America. Her 2023 book, The Prism of Human Rights: Seeking Justice amid Gender Violence in Rural Ecuador (Rutgers University Press) documents the effects of human rights on local responses to intimate partner violence on Ecuador’s coast over the last twenty years. In it, she draws on two decades of research and activism to explore two facets of human rights—one, their contribution to the unfinished journey to justice for victims of gender violence, and two, their role in a global cultural project in which “rights” are associated with modernity, development, and democratic states.

Friederic’s current research projects include (1) queer youth and alternative masculinities in rural Ecuador and (2) “Listening to Your Body”: Managing Chronic, Contested Illnesses in Sweden. While she remains committed to understanding how ideas of gender, identity, and violence change in response to human rights-based policies and discourses in Ecuador, she is also pursuing new research on gender, illness, and interoception in Sweden, inspired in part by her own personal journal with chronic illness.

Karin Friederic’s research has been published in diverse venues and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Feminist Review Trust, among others. Karin was also awarded the 2015 Campbell Fellowship for Transformative Research on Women in the Developing World by the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since coming to Wake Forest University, she has introduced a number of new courses, including Human Rights in Latin America, the Anthropology of Global Health, and Save the World in One Click!, a first year seminar on the ethics of charity and humanitarianism. She regularly teaches the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. 

Since the year 2000, Karin has also worked closely with Ecuadorian communities in their efforts to obtain health care services and mobilize against gender violence. In 2003, she co-founded a nonprofit organization, The Minga Foundation, which is dedicated to improving global health through community-led development. Karin joined the Department of Anthropology at Wake Forest University after completing her MA and Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. She received her BA in Anthropology from The Colorado College. 

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