Writing & Research
Silverstein’s writing explores identity formation, visual culture, reproductive justice, and the politics of representation through both personal and critical lenses.
As a double-diasporic Jewish writer of Mexican heritage, her work examines the complexities of race, belonging, memory, and cultural identity within the framework of U.S. race consciousness. She writes critically about intersectionality, diaspora, and the tensions of navigating multiple cultural inheritances within systems that often demand simplification and legibility.
Her published writing includes reflections on Jewish identity, non-Zionism, family history, and multiethnic experience, including:
Alongside her cultural criticism and personal essays, Silverstein writes critically about visual culture and documentary practice, with a particular focus on commercial birth photography and the visual politics surrounding birth, care, and maternal representation.
Her research examines how birth photography operates within larger systems of race, class, aesthetics, and medical authority, and how dominant visual conventions often reproduce exclusionary narratives around who is worthy of visibility, relationality, and archival presence.
Through both scholarship and public-facing writing, she is interested in how photography functions as evidence, memory, narrative, and power.
Her work moves between critical analysis, lived experience, and cultural commentary, grounded in the belief that storytelling can challenge inherited narratives and create space for more expansive understandings of identity, care, and belonging.