Writing-up seminar with Emilija Zabiliute

Emilija Zabiliute’s writing-up seminar on Monday 13 January when we will discuss her text Between the Family and the Clinic: Reproductive Health Interventions in an Urban Poor Neighbourhood in Delhi.

Please write directly to Emilija who will distribute her paper to those who have signed up:
fjq214@hum.ku.dk
Venue: 10-4-05 KUA2
Time: 1.30-3pm
ECTS: 1,8 for paper presentation and 0,3 for active participation

Emilija’s abstract:

Slums are usually associated with informality, exclusion and abandonment. However, in the Global South, a vast variety of globally and nationally embedded humanitarian and welfare programmes are designed to specifically target the residents of the urban squatter settlements. Thus, though excluded economically, urban poor constitute a certain category of intervention. What is produced through this ‘inclusion’? This paper looks at one specific example of such encounter: a maternal health programme ran by a governmental dispensary in an urban poor neighbourhood in Delhi, India. More specifically, it interrogates the process of the production of bodies through this encounter, and the way the abject body of a slum dweller is constructed through these interventions.
Firstly, it looks at the discursive constructs of the body of the urban poor that the programme entails. Secondly, it analyses the observations of the daily visits of the urban poor women to a governmental dispensary. Empirically these realms are connected through ASHA workers, female residents of the slums that are mobilized to work for the maternal health cause in their neighbourhoods. ASHAs also provide an analytical lens as they connect the disorderly undisciplined slum body with the desired healthy national body. The chapter is based on the ethnographic and visual material collected during a long-term fieldwork.