DPhil Student
St Antony's College
In my research, I work with resettled Rohingya communities in the United Kingdom and United States to co-explore ways in which their bodies, health/wellbeing, and illnesses/suffering become biosocially (re)made, experienced, and articulated over time, through a medical anthropological and decolonial lens. The Rohingya – a minority ethnic, predominantly Muslim community from Myanmar – have endured a prolonged history of violent expulsion from the material fabric of their homeland after having been progressively ‘un-imagined’ from the national space which circumscribes it. Victims and survivors of ongoing genocide, mass-scale forced displacement, and statelessness, Rohingya are enmeshed in a plurality of global and local institutions, laws and policies, practices, and sites of truth-making which seek to govern ‘matter out of place’ while simultaneously providing ostensible protection and care. Locating itself at the nexus of the macro/remote–micro/intimate and past–present, this project investigates how these histories and nebulous assemblages of intervention collide with, reach into, and become experientially and materially tangible, meaningful, and contested in resettled Rohingya’s everyday lifeworlds, focusing on the implications of these entanglements for their bodies (conceived both biophysically and phenomenologically), health/wellbeing, and illnesses/suffering. This work endeavours to unsettle and denaturalize hegemonic ideas about the origins/etiologies of disease and illness/suffering amongst displaced communities, and hopes (humbly) to contribute to ongoing projects in pursuit of epistemic justice and the political and material realisation of a more caring and restorative present/future for Rohingya.
I hold an MPhil in medical anthropology, MPH with a concentration in public health policy and administration, BS in microbiology with an emphasis in infectious disease, and BA in global health, and have been trained in the inquiry and analysis of health-related phenomena through multiple disciplinary lenses, spanning biochemical, quantitative, and qualitative methods. I have worked in spaces of research and practice/service delivery, within domains of basic biomedical science, health care, public health, and refugee resettlement, and across private, governmental, and non-profit sectors. I’m broadly interested in how transdisciplinary, multi-methodological, and decolonial approaches to thinking about bodies and health might mobilise new possibilities for the alleviation of preventable global inequities in illness and suffering, and the radical reimagination of systems of care.
