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Dr. Kara Miller is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Applied Anthropology, specializing in medical anthropology, body politics, and eco-social well-being. Her work explores how bodily ways of knowing can enliven structures that affect and manage people’s lives, through investigations of health equity, and utilizing holistic anthropological approaches in fieldwork and ethnography. Her work is informed by health humanities, feminist epistemologies, and critical social theory and is centered in discourses of embodiment, which look to the visceral, felt aspects of experience in order to understand human complexities and conditions. Dr. Miller’s work seeks to renovate healing systems and institutions with care and coherence generated through nuanced understandings, and her methods are based in practices of relational empowerment and shared sense-making. 

Previous research in East Africa examines the embodied politics of health policies regulating women’s sexual and reproductive health. Dr. Miller's other projects include: humanizing mental health systems in New Orleans; collaborative community work on access to health care for communities in California; and facilitating a National Institutes of Health study in Uganda on integrative medicine. Her current work looks at embodied ecologies, particularly with regard to toxic industrial practices and avenues for health sovereignty in greater Los Angeles. She has published and written policy on the human need for experiences with art and in nature, which necessitate conservation and access to wild spaces as well as opportunities for meaningful, creative interactions, and Dr. Miller's on-going work utilizes arts-based interventions for community healing and well-being.