Liza Buchbinder is an anthropologist and internist within the field of social medicine, and her research focuses on critical human rights and vulnerability in institutional settings, be it the criminal justice system, the human rights industry, or the American hospital system. Her most substantial research project is based on a lifelong commitment to a rural community in Togo, West Africa, that she first encountered as a Peace Corps volunteer. Oscillating back and forth between West Africa and the United States over twenty years, she has profiled the community’s diaspora of adolescent labor migrants. This work is the basis for a book manuscript at the University of Wisconsin Press on the limits of naming violence against adolescent domestic servants through the rights discourse on child trafficking. She is also developing a new project in Togo that interrogates the relationship between changing indigenous landscapes due to climate change & deforestation and its impact on ritualized religious & healing practices.

Clinically, Dr. Buchbinder works as a hospitalist for UCLA Health and as a physician for a jail in southern California. As an embroiled provider and anthropologist working in a diverse array of settings, she draws on her experiences as a practitioner to write clinical ethnography for academic medical and social science journals. Presently, she is the lead editor and contributing author for a special issue entitled “Ethnography of and in Clinical Formation: Poetics and Politics of Dual Subjectivity” in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.  As a core member of the University of North Carolina STEPPS research team, Dr Buchbinder has also co-authored articles on physician burnout and pandemic stress in flagship journals, such as the Journal of General Internal Medicine, American Journal of Bioethics, and the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.