Matusovsky, Bri. Primates and Plantation Futures: Unsettling Science and Consent on St. Kitts. San Francisco ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2026. 32742815.
Perissinotto CM, Hough K, Tha SH, Matusovsky B, Escueta D, Burnes P, Kotwal AA. "Implementing a telephone-based support program to address loneliness in older adults." Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2025 Sep 10.
Correa, Maria A., Bri Matusovsky, Doug E. Brackney, and Blaire Steven. "Generation of axenic Aedes aegypti demonstrate live bacteria are not required for mosquito development." Nature Communications 9, no. 1 (2018): 4464.
Matusovsky, Bri. “Beyond 'Yes or No': Affective Consent, and The Complications of Acknowledging Non-Verbal Consent.” 4S Backchannels (2026).
Adams, Vincanne, Bri Matusovsky. "Medical Abolition: A Resolution Paper." UCSF REPAIR Project. 2023.
Matusovsky, Bri. "Fragmentation and Resilience: Changing Social Spaces for Lesbian and Bisexual Women, Transgender and Gender Non-Binary Individuals in Romania." Global Health Studies Undergraduate Thesis Paper. Yale College. 2019.
Dissertation Abstract
What does it mean for people and animals to be labeled as problems? My dissertation, Primates and Plantation Futures: Unsettling Science and Consent on St. Kitts, examines this question by reframing the issue of invasive green monkeys on St. Kitts, a predominantly Black Caribbean island. Kittitian people and green monkeys suffer from food insecurity, a phenomenon locally known as “the monkey problem.” Scientists, veterinarians, policymakers, and primatologists have sought to address the monkey problem since the abolition of sugar plantations on St. Kitts in 2004, but have been unsuccessful. I conducted 16 months of ethnographic inquiry and over 300 semi-structured interviews with interlocutors across farms, laboratories, local archives, and eco-tourist destinations. My research on the monkey problem reveals how the designation of people and animals as problems is used to justify the reproduction of plantation logics predicated on non-consent and violence.
By unsettling science and consent on St. Kitts, I make three distinct contributions to anthropology and related fields. First, in conducting discourse analysis of descriptions and stories of the monkey problem in research, news stories, science, and my interlocutors’ stories, I contend that mismatched sensorial attunements – different somatic experiences and perceptions of the world – lead to disagreements and conflicts about the nature of the monkey problem. For example, I contend that technical jargon – descriptions of rigor and animal welfare in scientific experimentation and environmental intervention – is used to reproduce culturally informed beliefs that certain people and animals are problems under the guise of objective scientific knowledge. Second, I argue that environmental racism is sustained through the persistent logics of the former plantation economy, which continue to affect everyday life in different forms. Third, I assert that only by attending to the non-consents of people and animals silenced by unequal power relations, past and present, can we move away from reproducing plantation logics and embrace queer feminist and decolonial visions for the future, including food sovereignty.