Donna Goldstein has written extensively on the intersection of race, gender, poverty and violence in Brazil. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (University of California Press 2003), focusing on the lives of impoverished domestic workers who deploy humor and laughter as strategic forms of resistance in their day-to-day struggle for survival.
Currently, she is writing about pharmaceutical politics, bioethics, regulation, and neoliberalism in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and the United States.