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Karin Friederic

Associate Professor

336.758.5976

Piccolo 120

CV

Cultural/Applied Anthropology

Dr. Karin Friederic is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University whose research examines the intersections of human rights, gender, violence, and health, with fieldwork in Latin America and Sweden. Her research and teaching interests span medical anthropology, global health, transnational feminism, global inequality, disability studies, and the study of chronic “contested” illnesses.

Her book, The Prism of Human Rights: Seeking Justice amid Gender Violence in Rural Ecuador (Rutgers University Press, 2023), explores how human rights discourses reshape family relations, gender identities, and responses to intimate partner violence on Ecuador’s coast. Drawing on two decades of research and activism, she shows both the possibilities and limits of human rights campaigns in advancing justice, especially in rural contexts.

Friederic continues her active engagement with Latin America in several ways: through ongoing research on gender, queer youth, and alternative masculinities in rural Ecuador; through a forthcoming Spanish-language edition of her book with FLACSO Ecuador; through her work as an expert witness in U.S. asylum cases involving Ecuadorian nationals fleeing gender-based and political violence; and through the Minga Foundation, a nonprofit she co-founded in 2003 dedicated to advancing global health through community-led development in Ecuador and beyond.

A throughline across her research is the question of how institutional categories — whether human rights frameworks or medical diagnoses — both enable and fail to capture the full dimensions of human suffering. Her current work extends this inquiry into the domain of chronic and contested illness through an ethnographic project examining how patients with ME/CFS navigate shifting diagnostic landscapes, healthcare systems, and bureaucratic structures in Sweden, with plans to expand into a comparative study in the United States. Dr. Friederic is actively involved in collaborative research with Swedish patient advocacy organizations and international scholarly networks aimed at improving recognition and care for people with infection-associated chronic illnesses. Her scholarly perspective is further deepened by situated, embodied knowledge drawn from over two decades of living with ME/CFS and POTS.

She received her BA in Anthropology from Colorado College and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona before joining the faculty at Wake Forest. In her free time, she loves traveling, mountain biking, and swimming in lakes with her family, and learning and practicing languages for fun.

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