Rachael Stryker Faculty Profile

Rachael Stryker, a cultural anthropologist, is fascinated by the interrelationship between culture, the brain, and early child development. Her work explores the comparative study of emotion socialization, with a focus on attachment formation and representation. She is the author of the book, The Road to Evergreen: Adoption, Attachment Therapy, and the Promise of Family (Cornell, 2010), which examines the cultural construction of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) diagnosis and treatment in the United States in light of emerging international and domestic child adoption systems. She is also co-editor (with Roberto González) of Up, Down, and Sideways: Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power (Berghahn, 2014). She is the author of several articles for the journals Childhood, Children and Youth Services Review, Global Studies of Childhood, and International Migration, and Research in Human Development. She currently studies youth perspectives on the emergence of pediatric psychologies in the West Bank, Palestine. She is heavily involved in the professionalization of the disciplines of Childhood Studies and the Anthropology of Childhood in the U.S., serving between 2013-15 as Convener of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group (ACYIG), and as co-editor of the journal, Children & Society. Dr. Stryker is also interested in exploring the value of public interest ethnography for promoting activist-scholarship and social reform. She is currently working on writing the textbook, Public Interest Ethnography: A Primer. Her collaborative ethnographic work with undergraduates on healthcare in California women’s prison appears in the popular textbook, Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology (14^th and 15th editions).