Author: SPAwordpress

Family narratives of Israeli immigrants in Berlin under changing political climate

This project examines how shifting political climates in Israel since 2023 are influencing the narratives and experiences of Israeli immigrants in Berlin regarding their family life and sense of home. It seeks to explore the interplay between intimate family dynamics and broader socio-political conditions, asking how political upheavals in Israel reshape concepts like responsibility, loyalty, and belonging — both to kin and to the nation-state. The ethnographic fieldwork will be situated within the Israeli community in Berlin, focusing on individuals who are actively reflecting on their life settings in response to recent changes in either their family conditions or the political climate. Drawing on psychological anthropological approaches, the study will attend to their moral selves, emotional processes, and narratives, aiming to provide a deeper understanding of how they navigate and reconfigure their family relationships and national identities in turbulent times.

“Personality and its Disorders: A Break from the Past”

This project examines how personality disorders function as a category in the Indian psychiatric system, and in the context of growing Hindu nationalism. It asks 1) what is a personality in the Indian context? And 2) what is a disordered personality? It examines these questions by studying how ideas about the personality and personality disorders circulate in and out of biomedical and non-biomedical spaces, and how the contemporaneous configuration of the personality in India breaks from Euro-American anthropological and biomedical canons.

“How to Decide: Exploring Advanced Care Planning and Spirituality in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania”

This project investigates the place of advanced care planning practices in the relationship between spirituality, care, and the experience of dying in the United States. It seeks to understand the relationship between advanced care planning and spirituality by exploring how individuals make decisions about their advanced care planning wishes, documentation, or lack thereof. The project takes place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

La Bobera: Under the Spell of Forgetting and the Politics of Memory in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s in Antioquia, Colombia

In 1995, Colombian neuroscientists diagnosed an early form of memory loss, understood as the curse of ‘la bobera,’ as early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, a rare condition affecting families in Antioquia, Colombia. My ethnographic research explores how individuals and families navigate early memory loss across biomedical frameworks, local understandings of a curse, and Colombia’s politics of collective memory. It raises several questions: How do individuals and families in Antioquia navigate early memory loss in a landscape where biomedical models, local understandings of forgetting, and charged politics of memory converge? How do individuals and their families make sense of life with forgetting? What knowledge emerges from viewing memory loss as a curse? How is early memory loss experienced in a place where forgetting and remembrance extend to the collective? In a region shaped by histories of violence, memory loss carries multiple layers of meaning, extending beyond the clinic into collective struggles over remembrance and forgetting. Through ethnographic encounters with families, sensory ethnography using sound, and archival research, I trace how experiences of forgetting exceed neuroscientific framings and unfold within Colombia’s collective memory. I approach memory loss not only as a clinical symptom but as a method and a site of memory politics.

“Madness in the Age of the Neural: Hysteria and the Psychic Life of Neuroscience in the UK”

The project studies Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), a contemporary neuroscientific model of hysteria. Through fieldwork in London, England it seeks to explore FND and the psychic life of neuroscience. It asks what aspects – e.g. subjectivity; legitimation and/or obfuscation of the roles of social factors such as sexual violence or poverty in mental health; narratives of injury and imaginations of recovery; or the relationships between culture, emotion, and the body – do neuroscientific imaginaries intervene in most vividly?

“Negotiating Care : An Ethnography of Mental Health Governance and Community-based Services in Rio Negro, Argentina”

This project investigates the ethics and expertise involved in mental health care and policymaking in Rio Negro, Argentina. It examines competing conceptualizations and interventions for serious mental illnesses (SMI), through fieldwork in Rio Negro’s interdisciplinary Mental Health Review board and a community mental health care center combined with archival research. It asks: how do review board actors and patients negotiate and constitutes SMI and good care for SMI? How are debates about good care shaped by histories of political violence, neoliberal health reforms, and community mental health activism? And how do board actions impact experiences of people living with SMI?