Arafaat Valiani is grateful to the Kalapuya people, many of whom are now citizens of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and the Tribes of the Siletz Indians on whose lands the University of Oregon is situated.
I am a medical sociologist and an historian of science and my current intellectual interests focus on questions of decolonization regarding biomedicine, specifically genomics, difference and precision medicine, especially among Indigenous peoples in Canada and South Asians globally. I am the founder of the Precision Health Equity Project which comprises the following research, training and community-based endeavors. Employing methods from Indigenous science and technology studies, de/postcolonial studies an
Dr. Valiani's first book, entitled Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity (Palgrave 2011), combined historical and ethnographic research methods to examine the effects of medical, ethno-religious and 'masculine' conceptions of the body on the formation of political community among Indigenous (Adivasi) and caste communities in modern India and its diasporas. This body of research contributes to debates in difference, sociology of the body, political histor