Research Interests: Informal pharmaceutical markets, Informality, Moral Economies, Knowledge Transfers, Antimicrobial Resistance, Falsified & Substandard Medicines, Corruption, and Mexico
About:
Rodrigo Rangel-Gutiérrez is a Mexican-American PhD student in the Medical Anthropology program. His research centers on informal pharmaceutical markets, where he examines how medicine sellers, inspectors, and everyday publics navigate and reshape regulatory norms. Using ethnographic methods, he explores how bureaucracy, surveillance, trust, risk, and moral economies are negotiated in settings where formal health systems are unevenly present and often distrusted. His recent work engages with the governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the circulation of falsified and substandard medicines in Mexico City.
Rodrigo’s broader interests lie at the intersections of medical and economic anthropology, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of regulation. He is developing a research agenda around “just transgressions”—acts of rule-bending or rule-breaking that are justified as necessary responses to structural inequality.
He holds a licenciatura in Anthropology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he conducted research on the informal border economy at Mexico’s southern border, and a master’s degree in Medical Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam. He has served as a guest lecturer at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, and his current work explores deception and regulatory mimicry in Mexico City’s tianguis medicine trade. He is a proud member of the community of La Merced in Mexico City.
Publications:
"On Illness Counterfactuals." Voces Disonantes: Pospandemia, April 2025.