Rachael Stryker Faculty Profile

Rachael  Stryker

Professor

Department of Human Development & Womens Studies

Rachael Stryker, a cultural anthropologist, is fascinated by the interrelationship between culture, the brain, and early child development. Her work explores the comparative study of childhood and emotion socialization, with a focus on attachment formation and representation. She is the author of the book, The Road to Evergreen: Adoption, Attachment Therapy, and the Promise of Family (Cornell, 2010), which examines the cultural construction of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) diagnosis and treatment in the United States. She is the author of several articles for the journals Childhood, Children and Society, Children and Youth Services Review, Global Studies of Childhood, and International Migration, and Research in Human Development. She currently studies youth perspectives on the emergence of pediatric psychologies in the West Bank, Palestine. She has been heavily involved in the professionalization of the disciplines of Childhood Studies and the Anthropology of Childhood in the U.S., serving between 2013-15 as Convener of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group (ACYIG), and between 2016 and 2020 as co-editor of the journal, Children & Society. Dr. Stryker is also interested in exploring the value of public interest ethnography for promoting activist-scholarship and social reform and is co-editor (with Roberto Gonzalez) of Up, Down, and Sideways: Anthropologists Trace the Pathwas of Power (Berghahn, 2014) and co-editor (with Nolas and Varvantakis) of Experiments in Worldly Ethnography (Routledge, 2024). Her collaborative ethnographic work with undergraduates on healthcare in California women’s prisons appears in the popular textbook, Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology (14th ,15th,16th  editions).

  • B.A. Macalester College
  • Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Spring Semester 2025
Course #SecCourse TitleDaysFromToLocationCampus
HDEV 30203Research Methods in HDEVARRWEB-ASYNCH
HDEV 30204Research Methods in HDEVARRWEB-ASYNCH
HDEV 30205Research Methods in HDEVARRWEB-ASYNCH