Abby Arthur Smith

Abby Arthur Smith is a qualitative and comparative-historical sociologist of morality. Her dissertation draws on archival records from state boards that administered eugenic sterilizations in the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s. She documents a gradual transformation in board members' imagined relationships between morality, the reproductive body, and society—a change that in turn shaped their perceptions of the legitimacy of eugenics over time.

A second, collaborative line of research concerns how infrastructure shapes lived experiences of race and disability, documenting the co-production of health disparities and identity subjectivities. Taken together, her work demonstrates how science, technology, and medicine shape—and are shaped by—ideas about the value and worth of different types of bodies.