Sandra Bärnreuther delivered a lecture on ‘Recast(e)ing Medicine in India: Contested Hierarchies of Expertise in Digital Primary Care’. It was chaired by Awadhendra Sharan.
ZOOM ID: 86308102912 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
This lecture examines a public-private partnership project in West Bengal, India, that trains and deploys people from marginalised communities as digital health workers in rural areas. I ask whether the introduction of digital health technologies in the primary care sector, coupled with skill training and task shifting, is leading to novel distributions of medical authority. Although digital technologies enable health workers from marginalised communities to enter the medical field as frontline health workers, I demonstrate that caste hierarchies inherent to the field continue to persist.
Sandra Bärnreuther is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She is the author of Substantial Relations: Making Global Reproductive Medicine in Postcolonial India, a historically informed ethnography of IVF in India. In her current project, she examines transformations in India’s primary healthcare sector through processes of digitalization and datafication.
Awadhendra Sharan is Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Monday, 20 January 2025, 4 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/3W5c1Hs
