Ulises Espinoza

Assistant Professor Ph.D. Princeton University, 2025

Expertise:

Clark Hall 404G

ulises.espinoza@sjsu.edu

Ulises J. Espinoza is an anthropologist whose work focuses on how value, politics, and knowledge production intertwine in the creation, practice, and institutionalization of scientific knowledge within medical systems and contemporary property regimes.

His current book manuscript explores questions of rupture, hope, and grief tied to narratives of progress amidst Achuar and Shuar communities in Southeastern Ecuador in the backdrop of the infrastructural expansion of the road in the Amazon Basin. It attends to how people weigh the value of their traditions against the market’s pull by attuning closely to the grain of everyday decisions that play into what it costs to live a life they deem worth living.

His new ethnographic project, conducted among medical professionals in the United States, traces how the formation of race as a biological concept becomes infused into technologies, algorithms, and clinical training, as a moral economy of care. That economy is constituted by credibility discourse—discourse that dictates what is deemed worth citing or teaching about race—and, in turn, shapes the kinds of care patients are afforded.