Anthropology Department Faculty

Research Overview

I am a medical and psychological anthropologist broadly interested in ethics/morality and cultural practices of self-cultivation. Using narrative and linguistic anthropological approaches, my work attends closely to the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of experience.

My most recent project explores how Maldivians experiencing madness and/or mental illness, and their kin, construct themselves as ethical ‘modern’ persons in a contemporary moment shaped by a multiplicity of modernization discourses. Taking a critical phenomenological approach to the study of personhood, this work examines (1) the intersections of public discourses—such as reformist Sunni-Islam, Global Mental Health, and liberal feminism—and the novel ways of conceptualizing subjective processes, such as emotion, illness, recovery, and sense of moral self; and (2) the (mental) health (in)equities produced by international and national structural forces, especially as they pertain to the gendered and classed experiences of those living with madness and/or mental illness.

Research Interests

• Medical anthropology
• Psychological anthropology
• Madness and mental illness
• Gendered and sexual violence
• Ethics, morality, and subjectivity
• Family intimacy
• South Asia