The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Neil Armstrong is a Student Mental Health Research Associate, Kings College London and Fellow in Harris Manchester College at University of Oxford. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Theology. Additionally, he has a Master of Science in Teaching and Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology.

What is your article “Is it Still Ok to be Ok? Mental Health Labels as a Campus Technology” about?

Is it Still Ok to be Ok? Mental Health Labels as a Campus Technology is about how students engage with mental health labels in new ways. Our ethnographic data show that although labels can still be a source of stigma, they are also something students use. Labels can facilitate interaction with academics and administrators; be used as a pliable means of negotiating social interaction; be creatively directed towards self-discovery; and can even be a means of promoting sexual capital and of finessing romantic encounters. So rather than being fixed and burdensome, labels emerge as flexible, fluid and contextual. To try to capture the usefulness of labels, we call them ‘campus technologies.’ Our findings give pause to quantitative mental health research that relies on labels having clear and simple meanings. But, equally, concerns about the power of labels to medicalize students also appear undermined.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I am a medical anthropologist who uses ethnographic methods to make lived experience of mental health problems legible to clinically engaged research.  I am interested in mental health bureaucracy, in particular how ideas like accountability might conflict with care quality. Currently, I am researching student mental health and assessing what it might mean for universities to become compassionate. Collaborative Ethnographic Working in Mental Health was published by Routledge in December 2023.

What drew you to this project?

I became concerned that the social science literature on mental health labels was out of date. Looking around on campus I could see that students engage with labels in creative and productive ways and that the literature had not caught up. The SMarTeN project provided me with an opportunity to work with students to coproduce a paper exploring their experiences with labels and relating this to ideas in the academic literature (https://www.smarten.org.uk/).

What was one of the most interesting findings?

A lot of research into student mental health assumes we can easily understand what people mean when they fill out questionnaires that use mental health labels. Perhaps this was true in the past. But our ethnographic work suggests that today, the meanings of key terms like ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘wellbeing’ are not fixed but fluid. Students actively engage with mental health labels to negotiate their life on campus. This suggests we might need to rethink how we conduct research, and particularly our reliance on quantitative data.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I recently finished John Burnside’s beautiful and heartbreaking memoirs A Lie About My Father and Waking Up in Toytown. I’ve been listening to Blaze Foley and watching Severance.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

We need to revisit what we think we know about young people and mental health. Things may not be as they appear.

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Cíntia Engel is a Visitor Scholar at the Institute for Bioethics & Health Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch. She is a Brazilian medical and social anthropologist working at the intersection of the anthropology of care, Feminist Science and Technology Studies and Health Humanities. Her research interests include geriatric care, dementia, drug complexity in treating dementia, and policies of care in Brazil.

What is your article “Dementia, a Polypharmaceutical Phenomenon: The Intimate Combinations of Dementia Drugs in Brazil” about?

The paper discusses how symptoms of dementia entangle with the multitude of drugs used to treat it. To state that dementia is a complex condition is commonplace. The medical literature typically explains it by the disease characteristics, and social sciences highlight its multiple social and affective consequences. In the paper, I discuss how the complexity also relates to the treatment. Based on an ethnography of one year and a half (2017–2018) in a Brazilian metropolis, within a Public Geriatric center and the households of three families, I argue that dementia is a phenomenon enmeshed in polypharmacy. I open the text presenting the universe of drug consumption and its variety, then, through ethnography, I observe different levels of combination between medication in this complex treatment: (i) between themselves, (ii) with time, and (iii) with social relations, politics, and care practices.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

For as long as I can remember, I have been curious about how life and death keep happening as they do. I grew up in a small town in the interior of southern Brazil. Following the advice of a teacher, I went to the Federal District and graduated in social sciences at the University of Brasilia, where I did my Master’s in Sociology and my Ph.D. in Anthropology. My research intersects medical anthropology, care anthropology, and feminist science and technology studies. I believe that ethnography can enrich exchanges between these fields, expanding the analysis of the socio-material health phenomena, which is my main area of research. In this area, my topics of interest are the socio-material body, dementia, care practices, intersectionality in health, and the drug complexity of chronic treatments. The methodological perspectives of Annemarie Mol and Veena Das and the philosophical imagination of Donna Haraway inspire my thinking and writing.

What drew you to this project?

During my Master’s degree, I researched care and Alzheimer’s disease, observing the exchanges and conversations of support groups for caregivers and newly diagnosed people. The topics of conversations covered dilemmas such as managing symptoms, finding acceptance, and dealing with the challenges of daily care. To my surprise, a recurring theme was drugs prescribed by physicians to deal with dementia and other comorbidities. Caregivers used to mention many drug names and share experiences and agonies about them. The mediators of the groups were social workers, psychologists, and occupational therapists. Despite being very familiar with drug conversations, they did not feel in the proper position to advise about it, so they organized the presence of a pharmacist at a meeting. It was one of the most crowded meetings I witnessed, and many participants spoke that day. At that moment, I was not able to discuss the role of medication in care, but I decided I should study it for my Ph.D.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

Once I started my research with geriatricians, I introduced myself as an anthropologist interested in studying Alzheimer’s disease and its medical treatment. However, they told me that perceiving medicines and diagnoses in isolation were insufficient. They taught me I needed to know the combination of diseases and substances used in each situation to discuss the medical treatment. One of their challenges was to deal with ‘drug interactions’: combinations of substances that could modify effects by intensifying, decreasing, or generating a dangerous side effect. They also taught me that caring for the ‘interactions’ was imperative in complex cases in which dementias combine with a series of other chronic diseases or even with social and financial dilemmas—and most dementia treated there were complex cases. I took this “native” notion of drug interaction and decided to play with it through its multiple consequences in care practice. There is more than one drug at work in most dementia cases, and they interact. By acknowledging the multitude of drug interactions, I argue that a polypharmaceutical phenomenon enacts dementia.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I am reading a beautiful book that teaches me about vulnerability and the complex relationships of love and care. The Vietnamese American and Queer poet Ocean Vuong writes “On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous” as if it was a letter to his mother, who cannot read. He harbors the violent outbursts of a mother traumatized by war and immigration while finding a way to embrace himself fully. It is a strong, sensitive, hurtful, and hopeful book.

I recently moved to the United States, and I am feeling a bit homesick, I have been listening on repeat the album Canto de Praya, by Hamilton de Holanda and Mestrinho. It is Chorinho, a musical genre that warms my heart.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

The most direct takeaway would be assuming that drugs are social beings that interact and probably rethinking dementia medical treatment to deal carefully with these relations.

I would also state the known yet necessary point that caring for dementia should be a collective concern, not centered on families, drugs, or institutions alone. We need more infrastructure of care and awareness for people with dementia to be themselves and live the best life possible.

Other places to connect:
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ResearchGate

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Ida Marie Lind Glavind is a PhD candidate in Anthropology, at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and at the Danish Alzheimer Association. In her dissertation, Ida followed people with Alzheimer’s disease living in Denmark, exploring how the disease affected their social life.

What is your article “Temporal Belonging: Loss of Time and Fragile Attempts to Belong with Alzheimer’s Disease” about?

In the article, I explore how a changing conception of time affects the social relations of people with Alzheimer’s disease living in Denmark. I argue that although the loss of sense of time is clinically defined as a “subjective loss of time,” it is rather an intersubjective loss. As people with Alzheimer’s break out of the shared rhythms and pace of everyday life – due to difficulties keeping track of dates and managing numbers – they challenge their closest relations. Secondly, I argue that from studying the ruptures and conflicts arising from the different conceptions of time, we learn that belonging as a sense of attachment is very much contingent on temporality.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

In my research project, I explore the lifeworlds of people with Alzheimer’s disease and their families through ethnographic methods. I have found it exciting – and challenging –  to conduct research among people whose conception of time and vocabulary is undergoing a radical change due to their illness.

What drew you to this project?

Before starting my Ph.D. project, I worked at the Danish Alzheimer Association, a patient organization for people with dementia. Here, I was repeatedly struck by how media coverage of dementia often excluded or left out the patients’ experience and instead focused on the caregivers’ perspective. This motivated me to formulate a research project taking its point of departure in the lifeworlds of people with dementia.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

Paying attention to the experiences of people with dementia offers us surprising and nuanced insights into how dementia is not only about loss, decay, and death but also about continuing care and social relations.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Currently, I am reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

I hope the article can give scholarly attention to the role of temporality in social life and illness. For families affected by dementia, I hope the article can give a new perspective about how the loss of sense of time befalls not only the person with dementia but also the rest of the family.

Other places to connect:
LinkedIn

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Iben Gjødsbøl is Assistant Professor at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. In her PhD, she explored questions of life’s worth and personhood in the face of dementia. Her current research explores how data-intensive medical technologies transform care and clinical practices, and how health professionals, researchers, and patients experience these transformations.    

What is your article ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage: ‘Curating’ the Human‘ about?

My article is about the everyday care for people who suffer from very progressed dementia. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork I did in a Danish nursing home specialized in dementia care as part of my PhD research. In the article, I attend to the ways in which nursing home staff care for residents who have lost their capacities for memory, agency, and communication and thus are pushed to the margins of conventional personhood. Demonstrating how caregivers during mundane care practices such as feeding and dressing uphold the residents as biographical human beings in belonging, I argue that dementia care should be recognized as a curatorial practice, preserving not only individual but also collective memories of what it takes to be human and belong in society.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I’m employed as a Professor at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. Since my dementia care research, I have moved on to investigate how precision medicine is being realized in the field of cardiology in Denmark. Next year, I will do fieldwork to study how the clinical implementation of an algorithm as a support tool for decision-making transforms the care for patients with ischemic heart disease. I am always drawn to explore how the local practices and understandings, I study during my ethnographic engagements in clinical and care practices, should be understood in the context of the Danish welfare state.

What drew you to this project?

I was drawn into the project on dementia care through my outstanding research leader, Professor Mette Nordahl Svendsen. In 2013, she received a prestigious grant for a research project entitled: A Life Worth Living: Negotiating Worthiness in Human and Animal (LifeWorth). In this project, we collaboratively investigated questions of personhood and life’s worth across the very beginnings and ends of life and across human and animal with empirical fields as diverse as neonatology, dementia diagnostics and care, and experimental animal studies. Being raised as a scholar in the LifeWorth project was an invaluable experience for me.     

What was one of the most interesting findings?

I was so impressed by the skills and persistence of the staff in the nursing home’s specialized unit. Every day, they tirelessly upheld the life stories, the social relations, and the agency of the very fragile residents who could only minimally respond to their care. These caregivers did everything they could to create lives worth living for the residents. Yet in the face of the residents’ profound disabilities and too little time and resources to provide proper care, caregivers also endured moral perils by sustaining the lives of the residents. 

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I’ve just embarked on an ethnographic research project about the implementation of artificial intelligence in clinical care for patients with ischemic heart disease, so I’m trying to delve into the growing social science literature on AI and algorithms in healthcare.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

With my article and the argument that we should recognize dementia care as a curatorial practice, I hope to voice and draw attention to the impressive work carried out in nursing homes every day. Caregivers who care for people at the margins of conventional human personhood are constantly upholding culturally specific notions of what it takes to be human and to belong. Yet nursing home caregiving is poorly paid, and it remains some of the least acclaimed and appreciated professions in our society. With the article, I hope to flag up dementia care as an essential yet morally challenging task fundamental for curating our human heritage, and thus for maintaining the cultural and societal imaginaries of the Danish welfare state.

Other places to connect:
University of Copenhagen

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Ben Belek, Head of Impact and Policy Analysis, Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental Science is a social and medical anthropologist with a PhD (2016) from the University of Cambridge.His research focused on identity, activism, and expertise among autistic adults. In a different project he explored the shifting economic and cultural values of blood constituents. Currently, he helps design sustainable, science based and climate conscious public policies.

What is your article “‘A Smaller Mask’: Freedom and Authenticity in Autistic Space” about?

The article is about the lengths some people go to present themselves in a certain way. Society has very strict expectations on how to behave, and many of us typically abide by these expectations, if only to keep ourselves out of trouble. But the case with many autistic people is that these expectations are completely out of synch with their natural inclinations. The result is that they need to work hard to appear to fit in; not even necessarily because they want to, but because the sanctions laid against those who don’t are often ruthless. Autscape is a distinctive social setting where the rules of social conduct are unusual because they were actively and explicitly designed for autistic people, by autistic people. I did fieldwork in Autscape and learned how its autistic attendees take advantage of this unique setting to reflect on such matters as autonomy, authenticity, and freedom.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

Since starting my PhD about ten years ago, my main research interest was autism. My vision was to make use of the tools and insights of social anthropology to explore the aspects of autism that aren’t usually talked about in other disciplines – like what it means for people on the spectrum to be autistic, what sense they make of it, and how their ideas about autism differ from those of experts. During my postdoc I began exploring quite a different topic, which is how the medical benefits of blood proteins make them the basis of economic exchange, despite the fact that in the most part they were given freely by blood donors. So these blood constituents constantly shift between being a gift and being a commodity, with all the cultural weight placed on blood – sanctity and defilement, strength and kinship, life and death. These days I’m doing something very different – I no longer do academic research, but work with the government to help it design public policies geared towards mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. It sounds technical but it’s not – public policy is the most applied form of social science, as it’s really just about people through and through.

What drew you to this project?

By now there are loads of exciting material about autism that take a critical perspective, but when I just got started, there honestly weren’t that many. My partner was a speech therapist, and she worked a lot with autistic children. She would tell me about her patients’ difficulties and preferences, which got me curious. But the only interpretations that were out there were those given by medical professionals and mental health experts. I found it to be a very medicalized and positivistic approach to human behavior, which did not sit right. Where were the subjective experiences? I wanted to understand how autistic people themselves make sense of their condition, and so I decided to go out and study it the way I thought was most appropriate – through ethnographic fieldwork.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

I’m not sure it’s a finding as such, but I thought my interlocutors’ frequent use of the mask motif was fascinating. A mask is of course a very rich metaphor, which is partly why masking is such a deep-rooted practice in so many cultural contexts around the world. Western social theory also has quite a rich tradition of musings over the meaning of masking in the more metaphorical sense, as with Goffman etc., and these infiltrated popular conceptions over impression management and the portrayal of oneself as if on a theatre stage. In that sense, there’s nothing particularly surprising about people invoking this image of unmasking. But what I thought was especially interesting in Autscape was the fact that the proverbial mask was not seen by its participants as a tool of self-expression, but rather as an instrument of oppression. So unlike in various festivals and carnivals where masks are donned to express freedom and rebellion, Autscape is a festival (arguably) where the removal of masks is what symbolizes liberation. I thought this was a very clever reversal of the typical mask metaphor on their part.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

I’m tempted to go on about House of the Dragon, but I’ll mention instead a book that I’m currently reading (well, listening; I have the audio version). This one is also about politics and governance, though it’s slightly less well-known than the HBO series. Admittedly, it does have fewer dragons. It’s a book titled The Sustainable State, by Chandran Nair. Nair offers a very well-argued and quite provocative roadmap for a sustainable economy, one in which consumption is reduced to a reasonable scale and where the state claims significantly higher authority over the free market. It’s a challenging read: Nair can be extremely persuasive, and while the enormous challenges of mitigating climate change and adapting to it undoubtedly require radical reforms in the economy, his proposition for a sustainable state goes against so many of the norms and values many of us currently live by. Listening through the book, I find myself shifting between enthusiastic support and stern objection to his ideas. To what extent does the climate crisis warrant taking risks with people’s rights and liberties? I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I definitely agree it’s a question worth asking.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

There are a lot of stereotypes about autism. Many of them are well meaning, but like all misconceptions, they ultimately do more harm than good. I think the main takeaway from my work is that autism is a very broad and diverse category, and upon meeting a person on the spectrum, it’s nearly impossible to know what to expect. But on top of that, autism is just a very dynamic concept, in the sense that it’s constantly ascribed different meanings by different people. And autistic people also do that work of charging the concept of autism with meaning, based on their own experiences, impressions, and ideas. The scientific discourse on autism is constantly pushing towards unambiguous claims and strict definitions; this has value, and it makes sense in some respects. But what my work demonstrates is that autism is as much a political category as it is a medical one. That’s not to say it’s any less real, or that the difficulties often endured by autistic people and those who love them are any less painful. It does however open up a space for a conversation about how changing the terms of the discussion on autism and designing appropriate accommodations might help make autistic people’s lives easier and more fulfilling. The way to do this is by listening to what people on the spectrum have to say, and taking that into account when decisions – about treatment, diagnosis, education, welfare, health, employment etc. – are made.

Other places to connect:
The Autism Anthropologist
LinkedIn
Twitter

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Elisa holds a Ph.D., MSc, BA, and Bachelors in Social Work. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Medical Anthropology Research Center at the Rovira i Virgili University. Her doctoral thesis focused on severe mental disorders and family care in the domestic space. Her research activity and interests are mental health, history of mental institutions, care, gender inequalities, and youth and drug addictions., Elisa is an Associate professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, located in Tarragona, Spain RV.

What is your article “Unraveling Reactionary Care: The Experience of Mother-Caregivers of Adults with Severe Mental Disorders in Catalonia” about?

In this article we looked at how many undocumented migrants visiting a low-threshold free non-governmental health service had mental health problems. Undocumented migrants are a diverse group comprised of amongst others rejected asylum seekers or labor migrants without a visa. They do not exist officially, cannot work legally, often have poor and uncertain housing conditions, and have in practice a restricted access to health care due to logistical and cultural barriers.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I am Argentine, I was born in Buenos Aires, and for almost 20 years I have lived in Spain, where I received a degree in Social Work, a bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology, a master’s degree in Medical Anthropology, and a year ago I finished my doctorate specializing in mental health. In my thesis, I compare the old asylum system of the total institution type and the domestic space, specifically with people diagnosed with SMI (especially schizophrenia), caring families, and mental health professionals.

In recent years I have worked on various topics, from LGBTIQ rights to religious confessions in Catalonia. My interests have also always been focused on health, specifically mental health, either from the history of mental institutions, as well as the work on schizophrenia, and drug use in adolescents, as well as the application of feminism and gender perspective in research projects. In recent times I have focused a lot on the analysis of care for people with SMD. On the other hand, I am also a social worker, so it is very important to me that the research is designed to transform reality, and that it has a real social impact on people’s lives; I place myself in applied and critical medical anthropology.

What drew you to this project?

I have been interested in this project because it involved participatory qualitative research with patients’ users of medication, caring families, and mental health professionals. In this sense, both the study subjects and the research topic were very close and connected to my doctoral research.

It was the first initiative in Europe of the “collaborative management of medication” (CMM), a cultural adaptation of Gaining Autonomy and Medication Management, developed in Quebec (Canada) and Brazil. The most attractive and important thing about this project is its real capacity to have an impact on the well-being of patients, in fact, some evaluations of the GAM initiative in Canada have found benefits such as rationalization of spending on anti-psychotics, reduced risks derived from overmedication, and improved patient satisfaction.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

In this project, we established three clear dimensions that, due to how they are experienced by the three agents in question (the patient, the caregivers, and the professionals), pose obstacles to the collaborative management of medication: the secondary effects of mediation, the (un)awareness of the disorder, and coercive models of communication.

We found it interesting that there is a palpable problem of indeterminacy surrounding the medication, the disorder, and the patient’s self that depicts a scenario of anticipation, suspicion, and mistrust. This setting paves the way for coercive practices and hinders the collaborative management of anti-psychotic medication.

The patients highlighted a social and clinical failure to recognize them as individuals with autonomy and agency. Caregivers’ perceptions of those affected as “vegetables”, “pieces of furniture”, including claims that they are grieving because their previous child has died (prior to diagnosis), all of them are expressions of structural coercion.

This coercion is found in the practice of care by the mothers or other relatives. One of the points we analyze in this article is that gender mandates on mothers’ caregivers promote coercion, surveillance, and control of their children. For this reason, we cannot understand institutional violence, that project some ways of coercion to domestic space, without gender-based violence. We analyzed how gender mandate and institutional violence operate in the ways that care is given in the domestic space.

If we want to promote a model of collaborative management of antipsychotic medication, we must encourage a new culture of care and recovery with all the actors involved, including taking into consideration the multiplicity of voices and perspectives among patients, caregivers, and clinicians. And, if we also want a change in care culture, we need to break the dual relationship between the two parties and the responsibility that it entails must be opened up to other actors and consequently to collective care.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Now I’m finishing the book by Marcos Obregón, “Contra la diagnóstico” (Against The Diagnostic). It is an autobiographical book that narrates the entire process, not only of the illness, but also the relationship with the clinic and institutions, and with its closest networks as relatives and friends. I think it is a brilliant book because it is also an ethnography, the author interviews various close people, some psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. who lived with or close to him through his bipolar crisis. It is a highly reflective, sensitive book, but above all, it is a necessary book, not only for people who are going through or have gone through an episode of subjective suffering, it is a book for life that everyone should read.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

The most important of this research is the “Guide for the Collaborative Management of medication” http://llibres.urv.cat/index.php/purv/catalog/book/477 (open access an English translation). It provides tools for greater empowerment of patients, as well as is an element to think about and analyze their personal and contextual situation, enhance self-knowledge, as well as be a guide to promote greater dialogue and negotiation with professionals. It also accompanies a whole reflection on the side effects of medication and the emotional, social, and physical health consequences that these may have. They are also invited to think about their support network and assess the close networks they have, for example, if they wanted to undertake a process of discontinuation, change, or reduction of medication with the professional’s accompaniment. Although the guide is designed for medication users, it is also a tool for professionals who want to transform their ways of relating to patients and practice a more horizontal, less hierarchical, more dialogical, and negotiating clinical attention. It is also a useful tool for caregivers who want to accompany their relative in processes that may involve changes in medication but also to better understand the discomfort and suffering that surrounds drug use, the side effects, and their consequences. In summary, the guide promotes that the agents involved have active and respectful listening and that they can better attend to the needs that drug users have, and aim for a better being in health, social, emotional, and relational life, among others.

Thank you for your time!

Other ways to connect:
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The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Burcu Mutlu is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Özyeğin University. She completed my Ph.D. in 2019 in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology & Society at MIT. She has published on trans/national politics of assisted reproductive technologies, reproductive labor, abortion politics, reproductive justice, and migration.

What is your article “Between Solidarity and Conflict: Tactical Biosociality of Turkish Egg Donors” explores the complex and ambivalent aspects of Turkish egg donors” about?

My article explores the complex and ambivalent aspects of Turkish egg donors’ involvement in transnational egg donation between Turkey and Northern Cyprus. The article drew on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews I conducted with Turkish egg donors at a private Northern Cypriot fertility clinic from November 2014 until January 2016. In this article, I investigate how young Turkish women tactically manage social relations and orient themselves in this morally ambivalent and precarious bioeconomy of egg donation. To do so, I particularly focus on possibilities of cooperation and conflict among egg donors who are part of a specific form of biomedical sociality. I argue that cross-border egg donation retains both gendered moral and economic concerns for these young women that must be tactically negotiated not only to protect this new (clandestine) realm of financial opportunity but also to navigate the wider context of heteropatriarchal sexual culture and restrictive reproductive biopolitics.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I completed my Ph.D. in 2019 with a dissertation entitled “Transnational Biopolitics and Family-Making in Secrecy: An Ethnography of Reproductive Travel from Turkey to Northern Cyprus.” In the dissertation, I investigated the transgressive cross-border reproductive travels between Turkey and Northern Cyprus that are stimulated by legal restrictions in Turkey, from a cultural anthropological and feminist STS perspective. I obtained my B.A. degree in Political Science and International Relations from Marmara University and my M.A. degree in Sociology from Boğaziçi University. Currently I am working on informal breast milk sharing practices via online platforms in times of politicized reproduction and a global pandemic. My research areas include: anthropology of reproductive technologies and biobanking; medical anthropology; feminist science & technology studies; family, kinship and gender; and transnational mobilities.

What drew you to this project?

My research interest in cross-border gamete donation is related to my M.A. project. In my thesis, I examined the local practice of assisted reproduction as a global biotechnology and its reflections on the lives and bodies of married heterosexual Turkish women (since assisted reproduction is only accessible to married heterosexual couples using their own gametes) as an intimately gendered and embodied reproductive experience. For the thesis, I conducted semi-structures interviews with married Turkish women as past or current fertility patients, and I also collected and discursively analyzed a variety of ethnographic materials including legal documents, religious discourses, economic policies, and media representations corcerning IVF in Turkey. I found that the “appropriate” and “inappropriate” forms of assisted reproduction are simultaneously configured in and through these local socio-technical articulations within and beyond the labs and clinics; transnational gamete donation thus emerges as a site of “reproductive excess” that is left outside the sphere of legality.

In my M.A. project, I investigated complex socio-technical processes that produce this excess in Turkey, with particular focus on the “appropriate” uses of assisted reproduction. In my PH.D. study, I studied this excess itself, by particularly focusing on the clandestine network of transnational gamete donation between Turkey and Northern Cyprus that includes the circulation of recipient couples, gamete donors, medical experts and technology, expertise, and capital. My article on Turkish egg donors resulted from this wider disseration project.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

I found interesting that although most Turkish egg donors I talked to said that they would support the legalization of egg donation in Turkey for recipients, they did not want donating eggs to be legally permissible for donors owing to their suspicions about the health sector in the country as well as their concerns about the possibility of higher competition (and therefore lower payment) among egg donors. So, they were willing to keep this new realm of financial opportunity secret, while undertaking all risks involved.  

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Recently I am watching Pantheon, animated sci-fi TV series on uploaded intelligence. It raises interesting questions on what it means to be human, how the boundaries between life and death get blurred beyond the limits of corporeality, and what social, economic, political, and intimate implications technologies have for both individuals and wider society. I also enjoy reading short stories by Turkish writers and my recent favorites are Melisa Kesmez, Aylin Balboa and Burçin Tetik. Finally, I would like to mention a podcast that I recently discovered on the weather changers/ weather modification on BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ddvpy2?utm_source=aposto ), thanks to Zappa Zamanlar, a blog curated by two Turkish sociologists, Biray Kırlı and Zafer Yenal from Boğaziçi University.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

One takeaway or action point people can get from my work would be to criticize and challenge states’ efforts of criminalizing or banning gamete donation that drive such practices further underground within and beyond the national borders and put both recipients and donors at risk for victimization and exploitation. Bottom-up efforts or regulations are needed that would not only guarantee safe medical practice but also address underlying social processes and inequalities, with a critical perspective that accurately captures diverse voices and experiences of involved actors.

Other places to connect:
Website
Academia.edu