|
|
|
E-mail: alison.macdonald@ucl.ac.uk
Year of start: 2008
Subject: Social Anthropology
Research Topic
Becoming ‘subjects’ and creating communities of care: breast cancer survivorship among middle class women in charitable organisations in urban India.
Supervisor(s)
Dr Sahra Gibbon
Dr Rebecca Empson
Introduction
My thesis describes the lives of urban middle class women who have had breast cancer and are cancer charity volunteers. It attempts to examine in detail this small and marginal community of women, exploring who these women are and the work that they do. The thesis describes how they conceptualise their personhood after cancer, having experienced particular re-workings of ‘relationality’ through novel processes of self-cultivation that are related to gendered ideologies and Hindu philosophies, as selves are re-made in emergent Indian middle class modernity. In turn the thesis examines how these emergent selves relate to the circulation of a particular imagining of breast cancer ‘survivorship’ in associative communities of care, exploring the ways in which therapeutic relations are formed and biosocial networks of care are mobilised around the disease.
Research Interests
- Anthropology of South Asia
- Anthropology of personhood
- Gender, Kinship and the body
- Medical anthropology
Academic Background/Education
Masters of Research (MRes) in Anthropology,
UCL, 2007-2008 (Distinction)
Bachelors of Science (BSc) Anthropology,
UCL 2004-2007 (1st class hons.)
Awards and Honours
- UCL Deans List 2007, Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences
- Daryll Ford Prize 2007, UCL Department of Anthropology
- Rose Morrison Prize 2006, UCL Department of Anthropology
Publications
Macdonald, A.C 2009 ‘Real’ and ‘imagined’ women: a feminist reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s Films UCL Anthropology Working Paper Series (3/2009) available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/anthropology/research/working_papers/032009
Conference Papers
- 'Seeing the self as subject: experiences of breast cancer among urban middle-class women in India' (forthcoming) NGender Seminar series, University of Sussex, May 2012
- 'Breast cancer survivorship among urban middle-class women in charitable organisations in India' (forthcoming) Medical Anthropology seminar series, UCL, March 2012
- Forthcoming: co-organisation of panel at ASA, JNU New Delhi, April 2012 , “Aesthetics of the body and healing in a globalising world”
- December 2011, “Considerations on a ‘novel’ technology: BRCA genetic testing and perceptions of risk in India”, paper presented at 3rd meeting of BRCA Network: ‘BRCA Gene Research and Medical Practices: comparative transnational social science workshop’, Brocher Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland
- March 2009 , “How do we save out daughters” , paper presented at 2nd meeting of BRCA Network: ‘Comparative understanding of ‘BRCA’ breast-cancer gene research & medical practices’ Department of Anthropology, University College London
Funding
PhD funded by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship
