Susan Greenhalgh is the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.
Her interests lie in the social and political study of science, medicine, and public health, with a focus on China in the post-Mao era. She has pioneered the study of the intimate connections between science and the state/policy/governance in the PRC.
Since 2013, Greenhalgh has been uncovering the hidden dynamics by which Western food and beverage corporations have been intervening in China’s science and policy to protect profits. Her work shows how Coca-Cola succeeded in quietly distorting China’s policy on obesity to align with Coke’s message that, when it comes to obesity, what matters is how much you exercise – not what you eat or drink. Two capstone articles on this research were published in early 2019. Other articles examine the construction of an energy-balance science of obesity in the U.S., and the methods needed to unearth corporate secrets. A book is underway.
Fat-talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat (Cornell, 2015) uncovers the hidden social effects of what began as an urgently needed public health campaign to combat obesity, but then mushroomed into a society-wide “war on fat.” Drawing on the narratives of young Californians, the book shows how our attempts to slow the obesity epidemic are inadvertently damaging the bodily and emotional health of young people, and disrupting families and intimate relationships. The book’s core concepts (biocitizen, biopedagogy, bioabuse) offer powerful tools for understanding how obesity has come to remake who we are as a nation, and how we might rethink our approach going forward.
For some 25 years, Greenhalgh sought to unearth the making, workings, and effects of China’s notorious one-child policy. This research resulted in three books, the award-winning Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (California, 2008), Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (with E. A. Winckler, Stanford, 2005), and Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China (Harvard, 2010).
She is also author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain (California, 2001), as well as editor of Can Science and Technology Save China? (with Li Zhang, Cornell, 2020) and Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry (Cambridge, 1995).
Greenhalgh’s work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard’s Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement of the Population Association of America (PAA), and the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences. Just One Child was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the American Association of University Women, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and multiple research centers at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California, Irvine.
Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2011, Greenhalgh was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and before that Senior Research Associate at the Population Council in New York City.