Shagufta K Bhangu is a Lecturer, GTA Lead and PGR Deputy Director in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Previously, Shagufta worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Wellcome-funded project, 'Grid Oncology : Remaking Cancer Care in India' between 2020 and 2022. She holds a MA and MPhil in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and a PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Shiv Nadar University (2021).

In 2017-2018, Shagufta was a Fulbright Doctoral Scholar in the joint medical anthropology programme at University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley. She is a member of the Culture, Medicine and Power (CMP) research group, the Anti-Racism and Decolonising Steering Committee (for which she served as Deputy Chair in 2023-2024) and the Spatialities and Networks of Cancer groups at King's. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Secretary of the Medical Anthropology Committee. She is also one of the convenors of the Politics of Cancer Network.

Research

• Pain & Grief
• Cancer
• Medical Anthropology
• South Asian Studies
• Epistemics, Evidence & Expertise

Shagufta researches new medical imaginaries and practices in South Asia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in eastern India (Bengal and Assam), she has studied the medicalisation of pain and cancer. In her work, she has focused on emergent epistemic forms and expertise, phenomenological experiences, conceptions and theories of the body, labour and embodiment, and an interrogation of illness and disease within socio-cultural, ecological and economic milieus.

For her doctoral research, Shagufta conducted fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork studying 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 southern Assam. In this frontier space, she is studying the intersections of cancer with medical care and nationhood, and is interrogating the work of epistemic and therapeutic institutions, constructions of community, and moral discourses.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSHM004/01B Social Medicine and Intersecting Inequalities

Postgraduate

• 7SSHM606 Global Health Ethics

PhD supervision

I am happy to supervise PhD projects, committed to the ethnographic method, related to my geographical and conceptual areas of expertise.

Further details

See Shagufta's research profile