Project description
Ethnographic studies on diabetes care in India
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-funded LIDIA project studies relational care among diabetes patients from the urban poor and the middle classes in Delhi, India. The project will contribute to ethnographic studies, providing in-depth knowledge on diabetes and care in an underexplored case country with a high incidence of the illness. The study of familial care will break from earlier research on diabetes that focused on self-care promoted by biomedical knowledge and institutions. By drawing attention to diabetes patients and their families’ social lives, the project will improve patients’ overall condition and medical treatment with a focus on diabetes care in everyday families’ social lives beyond clinical settings.
Objective
The project examines relational care among diabetes patients from two social classes in Delhi: urban poor and the middle class. It will contribute to the existing ethnographic studies on diabetes and care by, first, providing an in-depth account of diabetes care in India, an underexplored case-country with a high incidence of the illness. Secondly, by providing a close ethnographic reading familial care, the study will break from earlier research on diabetes that largely focuses on self-care propagated by biomedical knowledge and institutions. Thirdly, the study will make theoretical contributions by developing a conceptual framework on relational care. It will do so by drawing on and bridging anthropological approaches that render care and and familial relatedness as forms of ongoing and habituated practices of the everyday, situated socioeconomically.
The overall action will further researcher’s academic career, and create a platform of knowledge exchange between the researcher and the hosting Institution, Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA). Through the implementation of research project, the action will also enhance researcher’s academic skills and facilitate her academic career. The project will enable researcher to enhance academic skills through a close work with the principal supervisor Ian Harper and through an active participation at the EdCMA and relevant research environment. The researcher’s project will create added value to the department’s organisation, research environment and networking activities. By focusing on chronic non-communicable illness, it will supplement the already strong EdCMA’s focus on infectious disease and mental health in the Global South. The work will feed directly into I. Harper’s on-going research into the ethics of global health; and the entanglement between health programmes, institutions and everyday life; and the relationships between chronic diseases and infectious disease.
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Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
EH8 9YL Edinburgh
United Kingdom