We understand the provision of healthcare to be a biopolitical endeavour that shapes and moulds particular forms of healthy and unhealthy subjectivity and one that has long been the subject of critical geographical enquiry.
Our work in this area focuses on unravelling the processes through which subjects are produced within global health and public health systems and assemblages. We are invested in tracing how bodies become enrolled in biopolitical practices (for example, through trials and testing), and how bodies are treated and differentiated through evaluation and provisioning of care. Moving beyond discourses of healthcare production, we trace emergent activism and forms of refusal which resist the subjectivising forces of global and state health programs, policies, and practices.
Sydney Calkin’s research on reproductive health considers how emergent activist networks and forms of technology are changing abortion access patterns, moving abortion care beyond conventional forms of state control, and cultivating alternative transnational structures for safe but clandestine abortion. Sydney will soon begin work on a major five-year ERC-funded study examining “self-managed health”, which will extend her work on self-managed abortion to include people’s use of antiretrovirals to self-manage HIV/AIDS prevention and sex hormones to self-manage gender transition. Sydney’s project aims to better understand people’s access to these medications as well as the safety of them.
Other research in this area includes innovate new projects under development by early career researchers such as Ed Kiely, who holds as Leverhulme Trust-funded fellowship. Ed uses collaborative research with mental health service users/survivors to challenge dominant epidemiological accounts of involuntary psychiatric detention (sectioning). The project sets out to theorise the multifaceted relationships between (mental) healthcare and state violence through the knowledge and perspectives of those with lived experience. The aim is to contribute to abolitionist discussions and activism against the carceral state.
Doctoral researchers Charlotte Stevens and Shruti Arora are also working on issues of embodiment and activism. Charlotte’s PhD research critically considers how medical technologies for weight loss enact specific geographies, bodies and practices of caring, bridging the literature on medical travel, embodiment, and assemblages of care. A multi-sited ethnography, with fieldwork in the UK and Türkiye, it follows the journeys of English residents who have undergone surgical weight loss procedures in healthcare systems outside the UK. Shruti's PhD research on reproductive politics in the context of rising authoritarianism in postcolonial India explores how abortion and reproductive laws are experienced by abortion and contraceptive seekers and providers. The project brings together three intersecting areas of scholarship: feminist legal geography, reproductive rights and justice, and health technologies.