Samiksha Bhan
C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Medical anthropology; genetic and reproductive technologies; chronicity; relationality and relatedness; ethnographies of waiting; State and governance; moral economy
Research Area(s)
South Asia; India
Departmental Activities
Working Groups: Science and Universality | Lived Utopias
Research Topic: Well-being
Profile
Samiksha Bhan joined the department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ in October 2020. She received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Delhi and an M.A. in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Before moving to MPI for her doctoral research, she was pursuing an MPhil in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad.
Samiksha’s PhD project is on the temporalities of disease and the politics of health in India. She studies alongside patient communities, doctors and laboratory technicians brought together by inherited blood diseases in Indian cities. Her project tries to understand how families suffering from, and at risk of, these diseases navigate the medical infrastructure involving politically and ethically fraught substances like blood, tissues and stem cells.
Previously as part of her M.A. programme, she conducted field research on the genres and performative spaces of Sufi music in Delhi. During the programme, she also received the Krishna Raj Travel Fellowship funded by the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) to work on the political and cultural affiliations of the Sylheti community in southern Assam.