Meredith Alberta Palmer, MPH, Ph.D.

PHD, GEOGRAPHY, UC BERKELEY, 2020

MPH, PUBLIC HEALTH, UC BERKELEY, 2015

BS, DEVELOPMENT SOCIOLOGY, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, 2011

For more updates, please see my personal web page at MeredithAlbertaPalmer.com

Research Interests

I am Tuscarora, Haudenosaunee (Grand River, Six Nations) by my mother line, and a UC Presidential Postdoc in UCLA's Department of Gender Studies and the American Indian Studies Program. I am a critical human geographer interested in the politics of race, space, and health in lands currently territorialized as North America. I am very pleased to share that I will be a UC Presidential Postdoc at UCLA with Dr. Mishuana Goeman, during the Fall 2020 semester. Following this, I will begin a Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting late fall, 2020. There I will be hosted by Dr. Suman Seth in the Science and Technology Studies Department and Dr. Jolene Rickard in American Studies and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. 

My work builds on growing fields of research on the role of science and technology in histories of dispossession and in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous people, and particularly of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people. My scholarship is rooted in Geography, Native American & Indigenous Studies, and Science & Technology Studies. I combine rigorous archival work, careful community commitments, and Indigenous methodologies of oral history and critical analysis, to narrate genealogies of the spatial politics of colonialism among the Haudenosaunee. 

Anchored in Human Geography’s commitment to the spatiality of human interaction, my dissertation, titled "Land, Family, Body: Measurement and the Racial Politics of US Colonialism in Haudenosaunee Country," shows how Euroamerican settler actors in state, educational, medical, and research contexts have engendered dispossessing practices of containment, discipline, and surveillance by deploying “Indianness” as a biologically significant marker of deficiency.

Presently, my postdoctoral work explores notions of consent and refusal in the biomedical context from and Indigenous feminist and Haudenosaunee perspectives, and will construct a critical understanding of the historic conditions of possibility that have given rise to Indigenous data sovereignty initiatives.

My work has been supported by the Henry Roe Cloud Dissertation Fellowship at Yale University, UC Chancellor’s Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Fellowships, and the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley.

Graduate Student Instruction

  • Development in Theory & History (Geog 112), Prof. Gillian Hart, UC Berkeley, Spring 2014
  • Worldings: Regions, Peoples & States (Geog 10), Prof. Jake Kosek, UC Berkeley, Fall 2017

Teaching Assistantships

  • Rethinking Globalization: Nature, Culture, Justice, various instructors, SIT, Fall 2009 – Spring 2010
  • Culture & Society: An International Field Experience (Soc 312), Prof. Swords, Ithaca College, Spring 2009