Medicalised maternities, markets and moralities in Bangladesh: Building academic foundations and transforming debates

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My PhD research explored recent transformations towards medicalised childbirth, marketisation of maternal health services, and new moralities of care in Bangladesh. Well into the 2000s, the vast majority of women in the country gave birth at home in the presence of non-professionalised attendants. However, recent years have witnessed rapid shifts toward highly medicalised practices during pregnancy and birth. Remarkably, by 2016, while half of women gave birth at home according to 'traditional' practices, over 30% of women gave birth through caesarean (NIPORT, icddr,b and MEASURE, 2019). Advanced biomedical forms of pregnancy and birth care, i.e., caesarean and ultrasonograms, are primarily made available through a minimally regulated healthcare market which today places such technologies within reach of women of all social classes living in even the most remote areas. My PhD research sought to make sense of these transformations, including how they reshape ideas of 'good care' among women and families, generate new medico-social landscapes, and are negotiated within and reconfigure moral orientations. This work has important implications for Bangladesh and contexts throughout the Global South.This fellowship will allow me to consolidate my findings and maximise my research impact. I will generate substantial research outputs based on my PhD research, thereby laying the foundation for a successful career as an academic anthropologist. It will allow me to transform academic and policy debates related to maternal health technologies and health markets in the global South to accommodate nuanced accounts of the situatedness of such therapeutic landscapes. The following four objectives of this fellowship will work synergistically to achieve these aims:1) Consolidate findings: Return to my PhD field site and spend one month in private health clinics to generate ethnographic data. This will allow me to test and finetune my initial findings for developing research outputs. 2) Position myself as a scholar in anthropology at the forefront of debates on health markets and maternal health technologies: Develop a book proposal from my PhD thesis and submit it to a leading academic press, e.g., Cornell, Stanford, Duke or Cambridge, and transform my thesis into an academic monograph. By the end of the fellowship, I intend to have a publication-ready monograph draft moving towards publication under contract. I will also prepare and submit at least one manuscript to a leading peer-reviewed anthropology journal, e.g., the American Ethnologist and/or Cultural Anthropology, and present my research during at least one large social science conference in UK/Europe (e.g., EASA or ASA).3) Transform policy debates: Currently, policy debates related to the technologisation and commodification of pregnancy and birth care in Bangladesh tend to be urban-centric, essentialise women as unnecessarily and problematically overusing commodified maternal health technologies and carry a negative valence toward the private health sector as exploitative and compromising clinical quality in the interest of maximising profits according to capitalist logics. Building on over a decade of work in Bangladesh as a global health practicioner and PhD researcher, I will leverage my in-country networks to organise two workshops with Bangladeshi collaborators. These will bring together public health officials, private health actors, development partners and researchers to exchange knowledge and push debates past reified discourses. Based on the workshops, we will draft and publish an op-ed in a national newspaper to move policy and public debates past urban-centric discourses that essentialise private health care provision and women's motivations for seeking private health services. 4) Expand my teaching skillset: Expand the breadth of my teaching skillset through co-convening, in a limited scope, the Anthropology of Global Health course.