Profile

Arafaat Valiani is grateful to the Kalapuya people, many of whom are now citizens of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and the Tribes of the Siletz Indians on whose lands the University of Oregon is situated. 

Overall, my current intellectual interests focus on ethical questions of decolonization regarding biomedicine and global health, specifically genetics, human genomics and precision medicine and how these intersect with difference and equity among South Asians in the Indian subcontinent and racialized peoples in the global North.

One stream of my research explores ethical issues associated with genetic research in postcolonial India. This research contributes insights on global health ethics, as well as history of the life sciences.

A second stream of my research involves my role as Principal Investigator (and founder) of the Precision Health Equity Project. The focus of our research team, comprising faculty at Arizona State University, the University of Oregon, the University of Calgary, Trent University and Ashoka University, is to navigate the bioethical issues involved in initiatives which seek to decolonize medical genetics and human genomics involving South Asian communities globally and other racialized communities. Among other inquires, we are in the process of creating a diagnostic tool that can assess decolonial protocols in genetic screening studies taking place in the global South thus facilitating decision-making as it concerns a study population’s choice to biobank their genomic data for future study.  

Dr. Valiani's first book, entitled Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity (Palgrave 2011), combined historical and ethnographic research methods to examine the ethics of medical, ethno-religious and 'masculine' conceptions of the body in anti-colonial movements among Indigenous (Adivasi) and caste communities in modern India and its diasporas. This body of research contributes to debates in difference, ethics and medicine, sociology of the body, and medico-political histories of South Asia. 

Before taking up his appointment in the Department of History at the University of Oregon, Arafaat Valiani was Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College.

Dr. Valiani welcomes inquiries but is not currently taking graduate students.