Sanghamitra Das

Sanghamitra Das

Inaugural Critical Caste Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Anthropology and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago

Sanghamitra Das is the inaugural Critical Caste Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Anthropology and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her doctoral dissertation research investigated the politics of sickle cell management in India, a rare genetic blood disorder that is biomedically characterized as primarily affecting Dalit-Bahujan and Indigenous/Adivasi communities in India. By centering on illness narratives, her dissertation highlights alternative Indigenous articulations of social, economic, medical, and environmental justice that trouble public health policies for marginalized communities that emphasize on biomedical and biopharmaceutical interventions. Sanghamitra’s broader research investigates how notions of social difference—emanating in race, caste, and Indigenous positionalities—are essentialized through genetic discourses that then structure global and local political economies of health. And how in turn, those marginalized through essentialist processes of stratification utilize their embodied knowledge and expertise to navigate structures and institutions of knowledge, capital, and power.

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