Susana Kolb Cadwell

My research focuses on indigenous understandings of the causes of diabetes in Mexico, which point to complex ways of conceiving the relationship between environment, infrastructure, sociality, and disease. Specifically, I am interested in understanding the role played by the construction of the highway and the concomitant influx of chemicals in Totonac and Tseltal accounts of the arrival of diabetes.

I believe this research can contribute to socio-historical and political explanations of diabetes that have been put forward by indigenous activists and communities primarily in the U.S. and Canada, as well as to conversations about the ways in which sociality is produced and mediated by the body and the environment in Lowland South America. I also hope to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue with ecological studies of the link between pesticides and microbiome-mediated diabetes risk.