Congratulations to PhD student Zara Bakshi on winning the prestigious Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. She received a grant for her project "The Making of Recoverable Subjects: Opioid Dependence and Gendered Care in Kashmir."
Zara Bakshi’s research asks what it means to become a recoverable subject in Kashmir, examining this question amid expanding institutional and community responses to opioid dependence. It explores the ways in which recovery comes to be defined, measured, and moralized, tracing the movement of clinical categories across archival, medical, religious, and everyday registers. The project considers the relationship between institutional expectations of recovery and the experiences of those seeking treatment, asking how ideas of health, responsibility, and well-being are negotiated in everyday life.
Following care across clinical settings, households, and community programs, the research examines the relationships through which treatment is organized and sustained. Central to this inquiry are the gendered dimensions of treatment and recovery, particularly women’s access to care. The project also examines the labor of attendant kin, most often women, who sustain therapeutic processes beyond formal institutions. This dimension of caregiving opens up questions about the boundaries of clinical responsibility and the relationship between formal treatment and the everyday labor of sustaining care.
Reading therapeutic settings as infrastructures, the research also traces the everyday work of waiting, maintenance, and repair through which institutions shape moral and affective life. Bringing together medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and the anthropology of infrastructure, this research aims to contribute to broader conversations about addiction and recovery, gendered care, and global health.