Mark Padilla

Mark Padilla is Associate Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. He is a medical anthropologist with cross-training and experience in public health both domestically and internationally. His work is located within a productive synergy between anthropology and the more applied concerns of public health. As an anthropologist trained in ethnographic methods, globalization, and critical medical anthropology, Padilla seeks to trouble the terms of discourse and “intervention” in public health, and to bring structural inequalities and material processes into greater focus in public health. His book, Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality and AIDS in the Dominican Republic, seeks to provide a critical structural analysis for patterns in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Caribbean, drawing on experience-near ethnography with male sex workers who work in the tourism industry in two Dominican cities. For this book, Padilla was honored to receive the Ruth Benedict Award for best solo-authored book on sexuality in the field of anthropology in 2008. Padilla is Principal Investigator for a Ford Foundation funded study called “Detroit Youth Passages” and encourages readers to visit the project website. This project takes a truly structural and critical approach to medical anthropology and applies it to analyze the political and economic context of Detroit, Michigan. This project uses a Community-Based Participatory Research approach, and includes three community-based organizations in Detroit who are working with three highly marginalized populations: (1) transgender women of color; (2) young women involved in sex work; and (3) Latino youth at risk for gang involvement.