Sangeeta Chattoo

Research Database

Project website: https://www.york.ac.uk/healthsciences/research/public-health/projects/inherited-blood-disorders-indian-case-study/

Sangeeta is a medical-anthropologist and an Associate Professor/ Senior Research Fellow within the Department of Health Sciences (moving to Sociology in November 2018).  She worked at the University of Western Australia and Leeds University before moving to York.  She has a long standing interest in inequalities and health, race, ethnicity, citizenship and social policy; family, kinship, gender and caring, and ethnographic and biographical methods of research.   Her recent research focuses on genetics and embodiment of risk, state use of reproductive technologies and global governance of health, with a special focus on India.  She is currently leading on an ESRC funded multi-sited ethnography of two common recessively inherited gene disorders, sickle cell and thalassaemia, across rural/ urban and the largely poor and ethnically marginalised communities across India.  The main objectives of the research are to understand how these conditions are being experienced and treated within a local therapeutic milieu; and to engage with the local communities to make recommendations for policy and practice, with a view to addressing some of the complex social and ethical issues raised by the governance of recessive gene disorders within the broader debates on alleviating global health inequalities in the South.  Sangeeta is an Associate Editor for Frontiers – Medical Sociology Section.