UCLA

Obesity rates have increased over the past few decades in the United States. In response, national research funding has increased, but the field of obesity research is competitive. Therefore, basic science researchers pursue novel explanations that now include environmental determinants of obesity. Those who produce raw experimental data, however, are not principal investigators; they are ‘technicians’ who are post-doctorates, international medical graduates, and recent immigrant scientists. This dissertation, therefore, analyzes how the political economy of laboratory fact making, in the context of a purported health crisis, shapes obesity knowledge and the biomedical workforce at my field site. I argue that research at my site is structured by political and economic forces that impact how investigators and technicians conduct scientific practice in a process I call “anticipatory caretaking practices.” Drawing on scholarship in science, technology, medicine, and also gender and health, the notion of anticipatory caretaking practices reveals what kinds of obesity knowledge are produced and by whom. I show how political and economic precarity impacts anticipatory practices and how that, in turn, affects laboratory experimental systems. I also illustrate how environmental biomedical subjecthood is produced via model animal organisms of human health. In this context, I also demonstrate how the labor of animal biomass is productive of scientific capital in the form of valuable data. Finally, I describe how grant-based funding impacts investigators as they seek novel yet familiar experimental questions to help make them more competitive in the field of developmental environmental obesity research. Each of these findings reflects changes in laboratory labor and show how, as a consequence of the environmental turn in obesity, an environmental politics of reproduction is produced. This dissertation contributes to scholarship at the intersections of science and technology studies, sociology of health and medicine, gender, and work and occupations.