Colloquium - Professor Robin Nelson

*To join this colloquium viturally please access Zoom through this link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/88545157932

Talk Title: A Matter of Methods: Interrogating Evolutionary Anthropological Assessments of Kin and Care in an Increasingly Globalized World

Who we consider kin and how anthropologists understand these relationships has continually shifted in response to changing theoretical orientations and recognition of variability in cultural and personal conceptualizations of family. My research explores these facets of kin making and care in the contemporary contexts of urban and migrating populations living in industrialized environments. In this talk, I will discuss how evolutionary anthropological conceptualizations and assessments of investment in kin, biological and fictive, have structured our theory building and data collection, while sometimes obscuring the complexity of lived relations. With evidence from my research on created relations, kin investment, identity, and health, I suggest that a grounded biocultural theory employing diverse ethnographic methods may enable us to navigate some of the more complicated human behavioral patterns (such as disinvestment in close kin) that have been relegated to anecdotes and cast aside in evolutionary investigations of family favor of more easily operationalizable data. Similarly, a better theoretical and methodological integration of the fluidity of relations over time while recognizing the everyday challenges navigated within these relationships enables anthropologists to re-visit what we understand to be the core behaviors that have shaped human evolution.

Short Biography:
Robin G. Nelson is an Associate Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Her research applies the evolutionary theories of kin and parental investment to studies of sociality and health in contemporary populations in the Caribbean and United States. Her previous work on caretaking strategies, residential context, and child health outcomes contributes to a broad focus on the influence of social experiences on health outcomes over the lifespan. She is currently co-developing a study exploring transgenerational community building and health outcomes amongst farmers in Texas. Her work engages with research in cultural anthropology, public health, gender studies, and Black feminist studies. She also investigates equity in science and the legacy of racism on theory building in biological anthropology. She received her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2008, and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University in the Laboratory for Human Biology Research. Dr. Nelson was most recently a faculty member at Santa Clara University before arriving at ASU in 2021.