Weaving strength and care: Situated reflections on women's work and the epistemology of care in biological anthropology

Abstract

This essay examines how gendered expectations, structural precarity, and institutional hierarchies shape research practices, knowledge production, and career trajectories in biological anthropology. Taking the figure of the “strong woman” as an entry point, it questions celebratory narratives of resilience that frame endurance as an individual virtue while obscuring the structural conditions that make such endurance necessary. Drawing on my situated experience working across South America, Central America, and Europe, and engaging with Latin American feminist scholarship, this essay argues that women's scientific work is sustained through forms of care that are central to, yet rarely recognized within, disciplinary definitions of rigor, authority, and scientific recognition. Care is approached not as a personal disposition, but as a form of labor embedded in fieldwork, laboratory practices, the stewardship of collections and data, and the maintenance of collaborative infrastructures over time. By foregrounding this often‐invisible work, the essay shows that women's contributions to biological anthropology cannot be understood apart from the material, ethical, and institutional arrangements through which knowledge is produced and maintained. In doing so, it reframes care as an epistemological practice that is fundamental to scientific accountability, disciplinary sustainability, and more equitable futures for biological anthropology.