Dr. María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra, MA
Dr. María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra, MA
Research Associate (PostDoc) / Lecturer
Member of Research Group Health Matters
Contact Details
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
NIG, 4th floor
Universitätsstraße 7
1010 Vienna
T: +43-1-4277-49523
E-Mail: mafe.olarte-sierra@univie.ac.at
Office Hours
Individual appointments via e-mail to
Research Focus Areas
- Medical anthropology
- Anthropology of Science
- Anthropology of the body
- Care practices
- Knowledge practices
Short Biography
María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra (Mafe) is a medical anthropologist and an anthropologist of science with a focus on ethnographic research. She addresses interactions of health, technology, and the body in highly biomedicalized and techno-logical contexts, including forensic victim identification in armed conflicts, prenatal testing, congenital cardiac diseases, and childhood cancer in Latin America.
She recently finished a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam with a project that addresses the role of judicial and humanitarian forensic knowledge in co-producing collective accounts of violence in Colombia. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna, in the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology in the group of Medical Anthropology and Global Health, where she will work on the search of forcibly disappeared persons as practices of collective care and sites of reconciliation in war-ridden contexts in Latin America.