Biography
Sofia Bowen is a PhD student in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine (GHSM).
Sofía holds a BSc in Social Anthropology at the University of Chile and an MSc in Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. During 2017, she worked as a research assistant in the project ‘Mental Health, Migration and the Megacity (São Paulo)’ with Prof Nikolas Rose (King’s College London). Currently, Sofía participates in the ‘Culture, Power and Medicine’ and the ‘Mental Health and Society’ research groups and is affiliated to the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health (King’s College London).
In addition to her research tasks at GHSM, Sofia is a board member of the Platform for Social Research on Mental Health in Latin America (PLASMA). She has also been awarded an ESRC/AHRC mobility fund to collaborate with academics in Japan and Europe in the project ‘Biomedicine and Beyond: The Social and Regulatory Dimensions of Therapeutics in Japan and the UK’.
Research
Thesis title: 'The social life of 'work-stress': an ethnographic approach of work-related mental health issues in Santiago of Chile'
Sofía’s research interests include psychiatry, culture and mental health; social security, labour and political economy of health; state power, citizenship and political transformations; science and technologies studies and cultures of expertise.
Her PhD research project, funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), explores the intersection between work relations, psychiatry and citizenship. Through long-term ethnography in Santiago of Chile, Sofia studied workers and experts’ experience with occupational health and psychiatric sick leave. In a time of political uprising in Chile, Sofia analyses how politics of health insurance and negotiations over the accountability of psychiatric diseases interplay with the emergence of claims for social justice and political change of historical forms of oppression within the workplace and beyond.
PhD supervision
- Principal supervisor: Dominique Behague
- Secondary supervisor: S Lochlann Jain
Further details
Research
Mental Health & Society research group
Seeking to better understand the socio-political dimensions of mental health and illness in the Global North and South.
Culture, Medicine & Power research group
Delving into the interdisciplinary study of social, cultural, political and historical dimensions of health and illness.
Features
Partnerships, Power, Potential: GHSM on from 10
This exhibition takes a look at the research being undertaken by GHSM academics and students across the world.
Chile: Postcard from the field
PhD student, Sofia Bown Silva shares her experience and findings from her time in Santiago, Chile, conducting fieldwork for her research thesis.
Research
Mental Health & Society research group
Seeking to better understand the socio-political dimensions of mental health and illness in the Global North and South.
Culture, Medicine & Power research group
Delving into the interdisciplinary study of social, cultural, political and historical dimensions of health and illness.
Features
Partnerships, Power, Potential: GHSM on from 10
This exhibition takes a look at the research being undertaken by GHSM academics and students across the world.
Chile: Postcard from the field
PhD student, Sofia Bown Silva shares her experience and findings from her time in Santiago, Chile, conducting fieldwork for her research thesis.