Q&A with Katharine Lee
Welcome Katie Lee, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University and member of the GenderSci Lab.
GSL: Congratulations, Katie! We’re so happy for you. What are you most excited about in this new faculty position?
I am really excited to be with undergraduate students again. During my postdoc (and while I was finishing my dissertation in the early pandemic), I engaged primarily with people who had MDs, PhDs, or were well along the grad school path. I missed the excitement that undergrads have for learning and how they often are able to bring what we tend to think of as really disparate bodies of literature and experience together in unique and valuable ways. In a liberal arts undergraduate setting like Tulane, students are taking lots of classes across disciplines and seeing connections that aren’t obvious to someone who is really steeped in a specific academic discipline.
GSL: You’re a very interdisciplinary scholar. What is your approach to synthesizing expertise from gender studies, biological anthropology, and engineering in your work?
This is a tough question! Biological anthropology is a really broad discipline that encompasses evolutionary, comparative, and biocultural approaches to understanding why and how humans are the way we are. My research tends to focus on physical activity, menstruation, ovarian hormones, and bone health, and I’m interested in how context influences human variation. At times, I use evolutionary and comparative approaches to understand variation in physiological processes like menstruation, while other times I am working to understand how gender (the social and interpersonal components) shapes experiences in ways that impact health. Moving between physiological systems and inclusive approaches to research with humans can be tricky as I move across disciplinary boundaries and norms, but it’s important and I appreciate being able to think with GSL about gender/sex.
I think my background in engineering means that I am able to leverage some types of technology and data-analytic approaches as tools more easily than someone who didn’t have that training. Thanks to experience on a variety interdisciplinary teams, I know how to frame and ask questions in ways that allow more technical collaborators (like a software engineer, a device manufacturer, lab technician) to understand the research questions that I’m ultimately interested in so we can work together to creatively use established techniques in sometimes non-traditional ways. It also means I bring familiarity with some technologies to collaborators that maybe haven’t been formally trained in these disciplines and so I can help add to the potential methodological toolkit. When I took calculus in high school, my teacher used to tell us with each theorem and proof we learned that we were adding to our problem-solving toolkit, and I guess I’ve carried that mentality with me for a really long time.
Feminism and gender studies really underpins a lot of how I see and define research problems. Once you start noticing how power shapes problems, structures, experiences, and access, it is hard to un-see. In my mind, this helps us to define research problems and questions differently and integrate multiple points of view. I like reading work from historians and feminist science and technology studies (STS) scholars to understand the histories of science and medicine to start re-envisioning how we might do work differently to produce more equitable results. The structures and incentives we have now were made up by people with power who harmed many people via colonialist, white supremacist, and misogynist approaches to progress. We don’t have to reproduce that, but we need to be thoughtful as we work to build something else.
GSL: Tell us about your work in the GenderSci Lab. What is your role in the Lab and what sort of research do you do?
Some days my biggest roles in the lab are finding relevant memes and making cool diagrams. I can also be counted on to point out when a line of thought will lead to a surveillance dystopia (more data isn’t always better, you know!) and how capitalism is destroying us all.
More seriously, I think my diversity of professional and research experiences is helpful for lab discussions on a variety of topics. I initially joined the lab to help with data stuff for the big COVID project, but then I got to stick around, even after Tamara outpaced me with coding in R and Kelsey came on full-time to keep everyone organized with data management and process documentation systems. I enjoy thinking with the lab about how “sex differences” research essentializes a simplistic binary definition of sex across many disciplines, and how gender (and all the rich social and structural forces it includes) gets left out of the discussion. Working with historians and philosophers challenges me because the rhetorical and analytical tools are so different from how I’ve been trained, but it makes it exciting. I hope the lab finds my contributions equally useful.
A lot of my research falls into areas that have been traditionally designated as “women’s health.” It’s sometimes difficult for me as a researcher with my specific focus to navigate the fact that yes, many aspects of female physiology are understudied, and yes, this is largely due to the fact that sexism predominates in medical and public health settings, but no, delineating all the ways that women (on average), are different (on average) from men in a specific setting is not the approach we need to take to address actual disparities based on gender/sex. Humans are far more complex than that, and you can’t separate gender and sex as neatly as some researchers attempt to do. I want to reframe the questions that get asked as we address interesting research on menstruation, physical activity, and bone health across the lifespan.
GSL: What will your new lab at Tulane focus on?
My new lab at Tulane will continue to focus on the biological anthropology topics I described above. I’m the only “human biology” focused biological anthropologist in my department, so I have a lot of possibilities. In the first year on the tenure-track, I focused primarily on teaching (I designed and taught two new classes both semesters), and finishing projects that were almost done (like the last couple GSL COVID papers, collaborative papers from my postdoc, and a long-term but self-contained manuscript I refuse to give up on).
Looking forward, there are some large, rich datasets that I helped collect in collaboration with Kate Clancy (and others) during graduate school and my postdoc which need significant time, attention, and thoughtful consideration. We have a long list of manuscript ideas involving the data from my dissertation work at the Mogielica human ecology field site in rural Poland and the BLEEDVax project, and we will continue to chip away at that work.
Right now, I have a few undergraduates at Tulane starting to work with existing de-identified physical activity, biomarker, and interview data. I know that gaining undergrad research experience was absolutely vital to my career progression, and so I want to give that opportunity to other students…research experience helps people identify what skills and tasks you enjoy (or abhor), and that is important for people in any career. In addition to providing hands-on research experience, I want to examine this data in order to construct a body of work that allows me to build a collaborative, community-based research project here locally in the Gulf South that thinks about how rural context shapes physical activity and health for women and (if feasible) gender minorities. This is again, one of the ways that working with GSL to think critically about how gender/sex functions in daily life and biomedicine is important to my overall work.
This second year at Tulane I’m still teaching each semester and working on getting my local research underway. That means I’m learning to navigate new university systems for spending research money and getting ethics approvals for research. At the same time, I’m continuing to work with GSL to think about disparities in adverse drug events, and I’m excited that this fall we’ve gotten two papers published (so far) on the topic. I’m also still working (slowly) on BLEEDVax papers and writing up some of my dissertation work for publication. I have more than enough to keep busy, but I’m lucky to have great collaborators on this journey!
SUGGESTED CITATION
Lee, K. “Q&A with Katharine Lee.” GenderSci Lab Blog. 2023 December 6. genderscilab.org/blog/q-and-a-with-katharine-lee
STATEMENT OF INTELLECTUAL LABOR
Kelsey Ichikawa and Sarah Richardson generated the questions and Katharine Lee provided her responses.