My research focuses on the commodification of maternal health services and biomedical technologies in peri-urban and rural Bangladesh, illuminating how technology and commodification reshape the medico-social worlds of pregnancy and birth. Academic and policy discourses around burgeoning health markets in the Global South often provide an explicit or implicit moral critique of the privatisation of healthcare, predominantly portraying health markets as an outgrowth of global neoliberal hegemony and tends to be critical of their effects. My research destabilises these assumptions, attending to the situatedness of maternal health markets and the intrinsic moralities of care that emerge and are renegotiated within and in response to health markets. This research makes significant contributions to social science in three key areas: it problematises tropes of health markets as amoral or immoral and elucidates emergent moralities within markets; it expands thinking into the social lives of health technologies, attending to the co-construction of advanced maternal health technologies and the social worlds of pregnancy and childbirth; and it contributes to academic and critical policy discussions as private health services mushroom throughout the Global South, extending thinking beyond reified discourses, and opening alternate imaginaries for private health sector engagements.
My overall goal for the fellowship is to successfully consolidate my research findings and maximise its impact. I aspire to generate substantial research outputs based on my PhD research, thereby laying the foundation for a successful career as an academic anthropologist. It will allow me to transform academic and policy debates related to maternal health technologies and health markets in the global South to accommodate nuanced accounts of the situatedness of such therapeutic landscapes.
I will work towards achieving these aspirations by:
While navigating post-PhD life can be stressful, try to enjoy the application process itself. Regardless of the outcome, it is a phenomenal exercise to work through how you want to level up the research that you have put a good portion of your life (and likely your heart and soul) into. It is an incredible privilege to have the support of mentors and peers to assist in the process and a valuable learning experience.
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