Esca is a postdoctoral researcher on the 'WelfareExperiences' project, a large mixed-methods coproduced comparison of how it feels to claim benefits in five European countries.

With a background in medical anthropology, Esca holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the organization, logics and patient experiences of biomedical care services. In previous projects, she explored novel approaches to psychosocial care during pregnancy in the Netherlands and the emergence of the concept of multimorbidity in recent health policies, as well as its everyday shape in the lives of UK patients. After her PhD, Esca worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and Shiv Nadar University (2024-2025), working on an interdisciplinary project exploring the biopolitics of global health after the Covid-19 pandemic. At King's, Esca will be conducting qualitative research on people's experiences with the benefits system in the UK, using interviews and mobile ethnography.

Broadly speaking, Esca is interested in diagnostic practices and categories, and people’s everyday interactions with health care services. She explores these using ethnographic, narrative, and participatory visual research methods

Research

• Mental health
• Chronic illness
• Health inequalities
• The social science of biomedicine
• Ethnography
• Biopolitics
• Narrative research

The Welfare Experiences project is an ambitious, innovative project comparing the experience of receiving benefits in five different countries: Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Spain and the UK. The project will be one of the first international comparisons of the experiences of individuals receiving public benefits. We are looking at the nature of these experiences, how different policies affect them, and their impacts – with the aim of making welfare systems work better. The project runs from 2023-28 and is both mixed-methods and coproduced. The pan-European research team includes eight different research organisations and seven organisations that work with people with lived experience of claiming.

Further details

See Esca's research profile