Rebecca J. Hester

• Global Health
• Latin American Migration
• Socio-cultural Studies of Health and Medicine
• Critical Security Studies
• Critical race and gender studies

• PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz
• MA, University of California, Santa Cruz
• BA, University of California, Berkeley

• Dean’s Advisory Committee on International Initiatives
• Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, Science and Technology in Society
• Medicine and Society Minor Curriculum Committee
• Associate Director of Education, Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies
• Faculty Adviser for the Minor in Medicine and Society
• Faculty Adviser for the Minor in Displacement Studies

• Best Dissertation in Latino Studies, Latino Studies Section Dissertation Award Committee, Latin American Studies Association, 2010
• Chancellor’s Post-doctoral Fellow, Latina/Latino Studies Program, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2009-2010
• President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship, University of California Santa Cruz, 2007-2007
• Diggs' Teaching Scholar 2018

Books

• Hester, R.J. (2014) Bodies in Translation: Public Health Promotion in Indigenous Mexican Migrant Communities in California. In: Alvarez, S., de Lima Costa, C., Feliú, F., Klahn, N., Hester, R.J., and Thayer, M. with Cruz C. Bueno, editors, Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.  

Journal Articles

• Hester, R.J. (2015) Cultural Competency Training and Indigenous Cultural Politics in California, Latino Studies Vol. 13, No.3, pp.336-338.
• Hester, R. J. (2012, December). The Promise and Paradox of Cultural Competence. In HEC Forum (Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 279-291).
• Hester, R.J., (2015) Biology as Opportunity: Hybridization from a Molecular Point of View. In: Hurt, S. and Lipschutz, R. eds. Hybrid Rule and State Formation: Public-Private Power in the 21st Century, New York, NY: Routledge.
• Hester, R.J. (2016) Culture in Medicine: An Argument against Competence, Critical Medical Humanities Reader, Edinburgh University Press, In press.
• Hester, R.J. (2019) Bioveillance: A techno-security response to biological danger, Science as Culture, December. DOI10.1080/09505431.2019.1705270.
• Hester, R. J., & Williams, O. D. (2019). The somatic-security industrial complex: theorizing the political economy of informationalized biology. Review of International Political Economy, 27(1), 98-124. DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2019.1625801
• Hester, R.J., (2018) Designing “smart” bodies: Molecular manipulation as a resilience-building strategy, in The Resilience Machine, Simin Davoudi, Jennifer Lawrence, Jim Bohland, eds, Routledge.

• Mary Moody Northern Endowment, Galveston, TX (Hester, R.J. PI) $2,500.00. “A Qualitative Research Project to Document Community Opinions on Welcoming Central American Refugee Children into the Galveston Community,” 2014.
• National Institutes of Health, Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Program, (Hester, R.J. PI) $21,161.27 “Power and Medicine: Exploring Curricular Innovations for Addressing Health Disparities,” 2011-2013.
• Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund (Hester, R.J. PI) $28,000.00. “Hear Our Voice: Capturing the Perspective of St. Vincent’s Patients,” 2011-2011.
• Programa de Investigación en Migración y Salud (PIMSA),University of California Office of the President, California and Mexico, (Hester, R.J., Co-PI with Pat Zavella and Dolores Paris Pombo) $40,000.  “Health Promotion in Indigenous Mexican Communities in Oaxaca and California,” 2006-2008.