Global Friday Presents
Dr. Vaibhav Saria
Assistant Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
Simon Fraser University

Abstract: This presentation looks at the confrontation between the imagination of Global Health to deliver health and the history of private health sector in India. I trace the tensions that characterize the private health sector in India such as the moral duty of serving the nation and the market pressure of making a profit. Studying the set of laws that govern private practice of doctors, I show how the afflicted patient and health providers in India are caught and participate between the aspirations of the nation, the market, and the protocols of disease management. These demands are made conflicting and reframes death, dying, and suffering in the clinic as a cause of immoral and profiteering ways often resulting in the extraordinary violence against doctors and other healthcare personnel. Tracing a Global Health intervention reveal the ways in which illness is threaded through discourses of the nation that the figure of the doctor embodies in the clinic. This explains how afflictions are understood through notions of sacrifice and morality rather than an overburdened, underfunded public sector as well as an unregulated private sector. 

Speaker's Bio: Vaibhav Saria is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Their book, Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India was published in 2021 by Fordham University Press. They are currently working on their second book which studies a Global Health intervention that aimed to shorten the time to diagnosis for tuberculosis in India. 

Webinar link
Webinar ID: 617 7934 4111
Webinar Passcode: 602288

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Global Fridays gratefully acknowledges funding from the Faculties of Indigenous Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities.