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Charlotte Stevens

Charlotte

Email: charlotte.stevens@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Bancroft Building 2.08

Profile

PhD Project

[Working Title] Bariatric Geographies: Weight Loss Technologies and the Boundaries of Care.

The transnationalisation of health and care through medical travel has held the diverse interests of researchers and stakeholders for some time. The differential ways actants move through and interface with healthcare systems, as well as the moral, social, economic, and political considerations this raises, motivates sincere efforts to conceptualise emergent mobilities. In recent years, in the UK, people who travel to undergo metabolic and bariatric surgery in private facilities abroad have become enrolled in fraught public debate not only around issues of risk, responsibility and regulation, but also renewed promise of pharmaceuticals newly licensed for weight loss. Working against this backdrop, this doctoral research project aims to chart emergent practices of bariatric care ‘on the move’. 

Through multisited ethnography, the research will learn from the lived experiences of UK residents who have self-funded metabolic and bariatric surgery in Türkiye, which has become known as a global surgical hub. It will also draw on interviews conducted with service providers, clinicians and facilitators in Türkiye and the UK. Attuning to the complex ways metabolic health is enacted, the project seeks to articulate the imaginations, vulnerabilities, and logics enfolded within this emergent carescape. The work aims to bridge the existing literature on international medical travel (IMT) and assemblages of health, considering the intersection of biomedical perspectives of disease and the (re)production of inequalities within globalised healthcare systems.

Research Interests

Health geographies; ethnographic methods; international medical travel; mobilities; metabolic illness; science and technology studies; structural inequalities.

Supervisors 

Professor Tim Brown

Dr Elizabeth Storer

Academic Background

MA Geography, QMUL

BA (Hons) Geography, QMUL

Funding 

QMUL HSS Principal’s Research Studentship

Research

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