Overview
Esca van Blarikom is a Postdoctoral Fellow working on the NFG-funded project: “The Biopolitics of Global Health After COVID-19”. She holds an MSc in Medical Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, a BS in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a Ph.D. from Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the organization, logics and patient experiences of biomedical care services. In previous projects, she explored novel approaches to psychosocial care during pregnancy in the Netherlands and the emergence of the concept of multimorbidity in recent health policies, as well as its everyday shape in the lives of UK patients. As a postdoctoral fellow, she works on a multidisciplinary project with a focus on social anthropology, biopolitics, and the question of global health after COVID-19 in collaboration with Shiv Nadar University in India. This project examines the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on how global public health is understood and practiced, with a comparative eye on social parameters in the Global North and South.
Broadly speaking, Esca is interested in diagnostic practices and categories, and people’s everyday interactions with health care services. She works with Lacanian notions of subjectivity to understand doctor-patient relations and the way that diagnoses become an important part of patients’ identities. Esca uses ethnographic, narrative, and participatory visual research methods. During her Ph.D., she created a collaborative short film and photography exhibition with participants in her study. More recently, Esca became interested in the paradoxes posed by the biopolitical framework: the way it always includes both the tendency to discipline and the desire to prevent human suffering; promotes a certain universality as well as exposing fragmentation. Her work centers on challenging disease and population categories that obscure everyday realities, ultimately exploring how to live meaningfully with illness.
Feel free to contact her: ev272@cornell.edu
Publications
‘Addressing Polypharmacy: Developing Public-Facing Resources Through Storytelling-Based Co-Design’. Co-authored with Alison Thomson, Nina Fudge, and Deborah Swinglehurst. 2024. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 23. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069241266194
‘Multimorbidity as Chronic Crisis: “Living on” with Multiple Long-Term Health Conditions in a Socially Disadvantaged London Borough’. Co-authored with Nina Fudge and Deborah Swinglehurst. Sociology of Health and Illness. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.13729
‘The Emergence of Multimorbidity as a Matter of Concern: A Critical Review.’ Co-authored with Nina Fudge and Deborah Swinglehurst. 2022. BioSocieties. 18: 614–631. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-022-00285-5
“’Who Am I to Say?” Dutch Care Providers’ Evaluation of Psychosocial Vulnerability in Pregnant Women.’” Co-authored with Bregje de Kok and Hilmar H. Bijma. 2022. Social Science & Medicine 307: 115181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115181.
Thinking in Between Podcast, with Stephen Hibs: “Death Without Weeping, Extimacy, and Biopolitics”. 2024.