Anthropology Department Faculty

Research Overview

Professor Mariner's research examines the relationship between social inequality and intimacy in the United States, asking how people form attachments against a backdrop of structural violence. As a cultural anthropologist additionally trained and licensed in clinical social work, she investigates how historical and contemporary structures of power, such as race and racism, shape how people construct notions of family, community, and self in their everyday lives. Her research ranges from transracial adoption and alternative kinships, to race and placemaking, to beauty and embodiment.

Her first book, Contingent Kinship (University of California Press, 2019), is based on research at a private adoption agency specializing in the transracial placement of Black and biracial children in Chicago. In developing the theoretical concept of “intimate speculation,” the book explores the speculative logics of domestic transracial adoption, by attending to how raced and classed exchanges of power, money, and knowledge produce notions of the Black child as a highly contingent imagined future. The conditions of possibility for this adoptive future often include historical legacies of dispossession and the devaluation of Black motherhood. Witnessing this process unfold within Chicago's landscape of stark race and class segregation has informed Professor Mariner's current interest in the relationship between social inequality and physical space.

Professor Mariner's second research project, fertileground, investigated the relationship between race and placemaking in Rochester, New York. In order to understand how individuals from marginalized groups build physical spaces of community within the context of hypersegregation, the project utilized community-based and participatory approaches to fieldwork, and employed the methods of observant participation, interviews, mapping, photography, and artistic production to capture the many ways residents create and sustain lifeworlds in a city sometimes described as “dying,” and where certain racialized spaces in particular have been problematically termed “fatal.” fertile ground sprouts from three existing intellectual traditions: theories of space and place, urban ethnography and history, and feminist and Black geographies. The research has given rise to a book (fertile ground in the flower city, forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2027), six zines, an undergraduate research training program (funded by an NSF CAREER Award), and a series of photography installations.

Recently, Professor Mariner launched a new research agenda, with the support of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. Informed by anthropology and critical science studies, Painting with Plastic considers the social, technical, environmental, and aesthetic politics of beauty treatments. As part of this new direction, Professor Mariner will be on leave in 2027 to pursue training in cosmetic science and nail technology. Through an examination of the confluence of beauty, plastic, and the body/environment, and their imbrications with questions of race/ethnicity, immigration, labor, gender, and power, this new project illuminates the cultural and aesthetic importance of nails and nail artistry (particularly for multiply marginalized subjects), while investigating the often overlooked (by humanists and social scientists) cosmetic science of evolving beauty technology. A central contradiction lies at the heart of the contemporary manicure: application of nail enhancements is a mode of gendered, raced, and classed labor, artistic self-expression, and a complicated respite for “self-care” in late-stage capitalism, while at the same time the plastic that enables this art form derives from fossil fuels, is increasingly found as miniscule particles in human and non-human flesh, and comprises entire pseudo-land-masses in Earth’s oceans. Painting with Plastic promises to illuminate the immense political and environmental stakes of beauty rituals, which are often seen as the frivolous domain of superficial feminized subjects, as well as bring attention to the intersection between technical, social, and aesthetic knowledges.

Research Interests

• intimacy and social inequality
• politics of race, class and gender
• temporality
• kinship and adoption
• care
• social work
• space and place
• visual anthropology
• beauty and embodiment
• United States