Tatiana
Chudakova
Associate Professor and Director of International Relations
Anthropology
Medical anthropology, science and technology, environment, ethnicity and indigeneity, nationalism, post-socialism. Geographic focus: Russia; North Asia
My research examines medicine, pharmaceuticals, expertise, and care across diverse social and political contexts, with a particular focus on how knowledge, therapeutic practices, and technologies move between institutional and everyday settings.
My first book, Mixing Medicines: the Politics of Health in Postsocialist Siberia (Fordham 2021), follows Russia's official medical sector's attempts to reinvent itself through state-led initiatives of "medical integration" that aim to recuperate indigenous therapeutic traditions associated with the state's ethnic and religious minorities. Based in Buryatia, a traditionally Buddhist region on the border of Russia and Mongolia known for its post-Soviet revival of "Tibetan medicine" and shamanism, the book traces the uneven terrains of encounter between indigenous healing, the state, and transnational medical flows.
My current ethnographic research investigates the social worlds of assistance animals. The project explores the social meanings of service, labor, disability, and access, as well as the challenges that assistance-animal teams encounter in public and professional life.