Dr Shagufta Bhangu

Dr Shagufta K Bhangu is a Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She joined King's in 2020 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Wellcome-funded project, 'Grid Oncology : Remaking Cancer Care in India'. She continues to be a member of this project team. She is also a part of the Culture, Medicine and Power (CMP) research group, the Anti-Racism and Decolonising Steering Committee and the Politics of Cancer Network.

Shagufta completed her doctoral research on the emergence of pain medicine in India from Shiv Nadar University, Delhi and was awarded her doctorate in 2021. A part of her doctoral programme was spent as a Fulbright scholar in the medical anthropology programme at University of California San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley.

Research

• Social & Medical Anthropology
• Psychological Anthropology
• South Asian Studies
• Cancer
• Pain, Death & Dying
• Bereavement & Grief Evidence
• Epistemics & Expertise

Shagufta's research explores the emergence of new medical fields and imaginaries in South Asia. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, her doctoral research explored the medicalisation of pain, medical epistemics and practices in a milieu of dwindling state-supported healthcare, industrial labour and chronic illness in Kolkata, India.

Her current project continues her ethnographic focus on medical care and patient worlds taking her to a cancer hospital in Assam. In this frontier space, she is studying imaginations and practices of care, community, blame and responsibility, and nationhood.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSHM004/01B Introduction to Social Medicine 2

Postgraduate

• 7SSHM606 Global Health Ethics

Shagufta is happy to co-supervise PhD projects in her geographical and conceptual areas of expertise.

Further details

See Shagufta's research profile