Stacey A. Langwick
· Associate ProfessorVerifiedCornell University · Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Active 2002–2026
About
Stacey A. Langwick is an anthropologist specializing in medicine, healing, and the body with a regional focus on East Africa, particularly Tanzania. Her research explores how healers in Tanzania are developing new conceptualizations of the body and bodily threats within a therapeutic landscape shaped by diseases such as AIDS and malaria. Langwick's work closely examines the ontological politics of healing in Tanzania, investigating the struggles over what and who constitutes reality in the realm of health and healing. She is currently engaged in two research projects, one of which is titled "Medicines that Feed Us: Plants, Sovereignty and Healing in a Toxic World." This project investigates the emergence of a new therapeutic practice in Tanzania known as dawa lishe, or nutritious medicines, which reconfigures the relationship between agriculture and medicine to address contemporary threats to well-being. Through this work, Langwick analyzes how Tanzanian herbal producers articulate a politics of habitability by exploring what forms of vitality and growth are possible in the current context, and how notions of medicine, property, chronicity, and crisis are translated and reconfigured within global health frameworks. Langwick serves as the lead faculty member for the Qualities of Life working group at Cornell's Mario Einaudi International Studies Center and co-organizes the Ecological Learning Collaboratory. Her research has received support from prestigious organizations including the American Council of Learned Scholars, National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and various Cornell institutes. As a Mellon New Directions Fellow, she studied intellectual property law with a focus on changing property regimes related to plants and therapeutic knowledge. Her scholarship critically engages with the intersections of traditional medicine, intellectual property, and justice in Tanzania, highlighting the dynamic and often unruly nature of healing practices that challenge colonial and postcolonial legacies. Langwick's work offers innovative perspectives on the interdependence of bodily and ecological health, emphasizing the importance of plant-based healing and sustainable agricultural practices in addressing the intertwined health and environmental crises of the twenty-first century.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Social Science
- Philosophy
- Ethnology
- Law
- Medicine
- Epistemology
- Traditional medicine
- Aesthetics
- History
- Ecology
- Art
Selected publications
2026-01-02
book1st authorCorrespondingMedicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine's intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Dawa lishe is not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants. Medicines That Feed Us offers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.
2026-01-02
book1st authorCorresponding2026-01-02
book1st authorCorrespondingMedicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrase dawa lishe , or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine’s intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Dawa lishe is not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants. Medicines That Feed Us offers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.
2026-01-01
book1st authorCorrespondingIntroduction Healing (in) a Toxic World
2026-01-19
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingGROUNDWORK FOR PLANETARY HEALTH: REIMAGINING GARDENS IN MEDICAL EDUCATION
Intellect Books · 2022-08-22
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingMaking Sense of Medicine - Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge; Leading historians, anthropologists, educators and designers explore the role of materiality in medical education. With a broad focus, international scope and experimental format, this is the first book to seriously reflect on the material relationship between the medical school and reproduction of medical knowledge. 81 col. and 34 b&w illus.
Berghahn Books · 2022 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Social Science
- Political Science
- Sociology
Chapter 11 Healers and Scientists: The Epistemological Politics of Research about Medicinal Plants in Tanzania or ‘Moving Away from Traditional Medicine" was published in Evidence, Ethos and Experiment on page 263.
Osiris · 2021 · 28 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Social Science
- Political Science
Late colonial efforts to articulate witchcraft and herbalism intervened in the precolonial categories of practice through which East Africans differentiated healing (uganga) and harming (uchawi). Taking these interventions as critical points in the genealogy of traditional medicine in Tanzania enables an account of how and why plants have become central to contemporary debates over indigenous knowledge. Developing, promoting, and protecting traditional medicine today requires articulating the properties of plants elucidated by science with the properties of ownership prescribed by modern law. This essay traces the practices of knowing and unknowing that forged traditional medicine in Tanzania and their role in constituting the terms, objects, and institutions through which struggles for justice have been imagined. I argue that the dynamism of traditional medicine as a modern category of knowledge and practice lay in its ability to solve (first colonial and then postcolonial) problems of knowledge and politics simultaneously. Twenty-first-century Tanzanian scientists, healers, herbal producers, policy makers, and patients grapple with these colonial legacies. Yet, traditional medicine has never fully captured the wide range of practices that strive to catalyze growth, fullness, maturation, extension, strength, and fertility. Healing remains unruly, and the friction this creates holds open the possibility of generating alternative forms of the therapeutic value of plants and rendering visible the ongoing forms of (dis)possession that shape notions of justice in late liberalism.
Anthropology News · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingIndiana University Press eBooks · 2018-01-26 · 11 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Recent grants
Modernizing Traditional Medicine and the Law
NSF · $234k · 2012–2018
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Hansjörg Dilger
- 3 shared
Robert N. Peck
Center for Global Health
- 3 shared
Luke R. Smart
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
- 2 shared
Abdoulaye Kane
Délégation Paris 5
- 2 shared
Abdoulaye Kane
- 1 shared
Charles M. Good
- 1 shared
Janet L. Heath
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- 1 shared
Julia Zenker
Awards & honors
- 2019-2024. Stephen H. Weiss Junior Fellows Award, Cornell Un…
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