Avilasha Ghosh

Avilasha Ghosh is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India.

At King’s, she is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, supported by the Commonwealth Split site Doctoral Scholarship 2022 award.

Avilasha has an MPhil degree in Social Anthropology from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSSC) Calcutta, where her research focused on women's intersubjective experiences of obesity and bariatric surgeries in India. She completed her MA in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India.

Her research interests include medical anthropology, health inequalities, illness experiences, gender, body politics, political economy, and social stratification.

Research

Thesis title: 'Chronic Living: Illness Experiences and the Healthcare System around Diabetes and Obesity Management in India'

Avilasha's PhD research studies the public and private healthcare system centered around diabetes and obesity management in India.

Through mixed methods and multi-sited ethnography in the clinics and hospitals of Delhi and Kolkata, she seeks to understand how dominant medical knowledge's and practices around chronic diseases and the quality of available healthcare influence people's disease understandings and health-seeking behaviors.

In exploring the challenges that patients diagnosed with diabetes and obesity across different socioeconomic groups confront with illness, labour, and formal and informal care practices in India, Avilasha's research aims to contribute to the larger debate on non-communicable diseases, health inequities, and health policy.

PhD supervision

• Primary supervisor: Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, IIT Delhi
• Secondary supervisor: Carlo Caduff