School of Humanities and Sciences
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Angela Garcia
Professor of Anthropology
BioProfessor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. A central theme is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. Her research is oriented toward understanding how attachments, affect, and practices of intimacy are important registers of politics and economy.
Garcia’s most recent book is The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Set in Mexico City, it examines how violence precedes and functions in the ways families seek to care for and protect each other. Central to this work are anexos (annexes), informal and coercive rehabilitation clinics for the treatment of drug addiction that are run and utilized by the working poor, and which incorporate violence into their therapeutic practices. Anexos are widespread across Mexico (and increasingly in the United States) and are widely condemned as abusive, illegal, ineffective, and unethical. By situating anexos within a larger social and historical frame, and closely attending to life within and beyond these spaces, Garcia shows that anexos provide refuge from the catastrophic and everyday violence associated with the drug war. The book also demonstrates that anexos are the leading resource for the treatment of drug addiction among Mexico’s poor, and are an essential space of protection for individuals at risk of the intensifying violence in Mexico.
Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010) received awards in anthropology and writing. The Pastoral Clinic explores the relationship between intergenerational heroin use, poverty and colonial history in northern New Mexico. It argues that heroin addiction among Hispanos is a contemporary expression of an enduring history of dispossession, social and intimate fragmentation, and the existential desire for a release from these. Ongoing work in the U.S. explores processes of legal “re-entry” and intimate repair that incarcerated and paroled drug users undertake, particularly within kin networks.
Currently, Garcia is studying the environmental, social, and bodily effects resulting from Mexico City’s ongoing desagüe, the massive drainage project initiated by Spanish colonists in the seventeenth century in the Valley of Mexico. Mexico City’s desagüe speaks to some of the most pressing concerns of our time: water scarcity, humans’ relationship to changing ecologies, and chronic disease. This project examines how the desagüe remakes bodies, neighborhoods, and social worlds. -
Justin Gardner
Associate Professor of Psychology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHow does neural activity in the human cortex create our sense of visual perception? We use a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging, computational modeling and analysis, and psychophysical measurements to link human perception to cortical brain activity.
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Chiara Gasteiger
Postdoctoral Scholar, Psychology
BioChiara Gasteiger, P.h.D. is a SPARQ Postdoctoral Scholar in the Mind & Body Lab, led by Associate Professor Alia Crum. Chiara's doctoral thesis explored how the transition to biosimilars can be improved, with a focus on optimising patient-practitioner communication and the involvement of companions (support people).
Chiara’s research aims to understand how the social environment influences the development of mindsets and how psycho-social forces can be harnessed to optimise people's mindsets about illness and improve health outcomes. She is also interested in understanding how changes in subjective mindsets can alter physiological mechanisms. Her other academic interests include patient-practitioner communication, patient expectations, funding and resource allocation in health and understanding how patients utilise social networks to cope with, manage and make sense of their illness.
Chiara is not currently available to supervise graduate students. Please contact the Mind & Body Lab manager, Jesse Barrera, for enquires about joining the lab. -
Xiao Ge
Adjunct Lecturer, Design Courses
Research Scientist, PsychologyBioResearcher (Design, Learning and Culture) + Educator
I see myself as a bridge between engineering and social sciences.
In my research, I study engineering design through lenses of social sciences theories and methods.
In my teaching, I bring social sciences to engineering graduate students.
Most recently, I also start bringing design into behavioral science, e.g., leading design workshops at Stanford SPARQ
As of May, 2024, I'm working on a research initiative to build learning frameworks of culturally inclusive, ecologically responsible technology design.
For more, visit: https://web.stanford.edu/~xiaog/
Xiao Ge’s design research focuses on understanding creative work theory and practice to improve practices of creativity, interdisciplinary teamwork, and engineering education. Ge’s research at Stanford spans across disciplines in both the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Psychology Department. Her research on culture and AI is also sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Ge has received Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (2018-2021), Best Paper Award from the prestigious design research journal Design Studies (2021), Rising Stars for Women in Mechanical Engineering (2021, MIT), and Poster Award at Stanford Data Science Conference (2023), to name a few.
Ge has taught design thinking and held innovation-learning workshops across industry and academia in various cultural contexts. She previously worked on an human-centered innovation project for Lockheed Martin spacecraft (2010-11) that led to successful implementation resulting in an estimated cost savings of $20 million per satellite. Ge worked as an innovation specialist and consultant to develop, launch and run systematic human-centered innovation program at Siemens China (2012-2014), where she taught design innovation to research project teams across sectors incl. healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure & cities. Over the years, Ge taught design innovation workshops across universities in Tokyo, Beijing, China and at Stanford. Ge consulted Deutsche Bahn Systel to build high-performance self-organizing teamwork (2017-18), corporate participants through Stanford Center for Professional Development Project Management Advanced Certificate program (2016), and served as corporate coach to Stanford ME310: Global Engineering Design Innovation (2019-). She has also hands-on consulted and launched a Makerspace in Beijing for kids to imagine, make and empathize (2015) and a postdoc program Stanford SPARQ center (2023-2024). Starting in 2024, Ge teaches two graduate-level research courses at Stanford on (Engineering) Design Theory and Methodology.
