Lesley Branagan Affiliated researcher - Leipzig University |
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03.08.2022-29.08.2022
Mental health in south India: The 'medicine and prayer' healing model
My objective is to write two stand-alone papers during the Brocher residency, that will be published in well-regarded academic journals. These papers will illustrate my original arguments concerning the entwinement of two usually-opposed modalities (psychiatry, faith healing), and will be rigorously supported by theory drawn from social science disciplines and interpreted in fresh light.
The two papers will aim to be a meaningful and significant scholarly contribution to the literature on mental health in India, and medical anthropology in south Asia.
I envisage that the papers will be of interest not only to scholars, but will also be highly relevant for public health policy makers, particularly those working on mental health in south Asia.
A secondary anticipated outcome is that publication of these two papers will help me to build my profile as an early career researcher within the field of medical anthropology. These publications will also ideally assist me in gaining a position as a scholar within an anthropology department in a well-regarded university. -
02.08.2019-30.09.2019
Navigating Uncertainty: Illness, Care and Agency in Urban India
My PhD thesis explores how women in a low-income Delhi neighbourhood navigate issues of care and agency within serious illness. It examines the interrelationship between illness, suffering, crisis of care and agency, through interpretation of selected health stories gathered during in-depth fieldwork. The fieldwork neighbourhood consists of newly urbanised rural migrants, who fall between the health care options that cater either to the very poor, or to the well-off middle class in a rapidly globalising city. Fitting neither category, and in response to the inadequate care they experience across the domains of family, neighbourhood and health institutions, women develop tactics to negotiate and cultivate care in intricate ways within these spheres. Using theories of care, kinship and agency, the thesis shows how women manoeuvre within and around different registers of illness, kinship relations and bureaucratic institutions, in order to act and forge different kinds of agency and care for themselves within illness contexts. My Brocher residency will be spent developing some of the themes in my recently completed thesis. One of these themes is the different tactical manoeuvres that families are forced to undertake in order to access hospital care under schemes for low-income people.