Over the past five years I have been involved in three concurrent projects.

1. My first book, Baloch Midwifery: Contesting the Global Percpetion of Midwifery in Balochistan, Pakistan was pubished in April 2024.

This book is the first major ethnography of Baloch midwives in Pakistan. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Balochistan province, it shows how dhīnabogs/dheenabogs (Baloch midwives ranging in age from about 30 to 80) and their dhīnabogirī (midwifery) aid women and their kin through labor and postpartum recovery.

Its chapters show how Baloch midwives’ forms and ethics of care have persisted, despite nearly two centuries of British colonial policies and the subsequent disparaging official views regarding South Asian Indigenous midwives, commonly known as dāīs, in both postcolonial India and Pakistan. Through their continued presence and effective uses of their traditional medicine, Baloch midwives contain, mediate, and offer a powerful critique of women’s iatrogenic suffering caused by unnecessary biomedical interventions. Through a nuanced analysis of Baloch midwives' ethical approach to caring for women, and their responses to the exigencies of women’s health, this book demonstrates why over a century of state efforts to modernize and biomedicalize childbirth practices have failed to convince the majority of Baloch women in Balochistan to give birth in hospitals. They instead prefer home births and the midwifery care from the dhīnabogs whom they trust.

This book will not only be of interest to scholars and students in anthropology, medical humanities, public health, sociology, gender and women’s studies, gender and medical history, South Asia studies, and global health studies, but also to those in the midwifery and the nursing profession. It will also be of interest to non-academic readers wishing to learn about midwives in South Asia and anyone interested in reading about traditional medicine and midwives who practice outside of European and North American cultural contexts.

The ethnography draws on over six years of work and fifteen months of sustained ethnographic research in Balochistan, Pakistan to trace the biopolitics of global reproductive health and rights policies and pharmaceutical globalization as well as the impact of these processes on Baloch women and their culture of midwifery. 

 In the book, I address the epistemological grids through which global South midwives have been construed historically and in postcolonial health development policy frameworks by way of juxtaposing my unexpected meetings of the dhinabogs, kawwas,and balluks against the normative conceptions of the figure underlying the globalized category of “traditional birth attendant (TBA)” and the South Asian category of the dai. I address how both of these universalized categories have discursively functioned to reduce and reify Indigenous midwives’ work, thus failing to adequately represent her. I contrast the British colonial and postcolonial discourses regarding South Asian midwives to delineate how Pakistan’s public health and social development policies—embedded as these are in a global universalized biomedicine and human-rights framework—render Baloch people, practices, and regions as traditional, rural, and tribal in their connotation as backward/outdated, underdeveloped, and perpetually anti-modern. Aided by scholarship on hauntology, ruination, and affective infrastructure I trace the contested “governmentality” of Baloch women and dhinabogs. I argue that Panjguri dhinabogs’ approach to dhinabogiri (midwifery) goes against the grain of the historical and contemporary production of knowledge about South Asian indigenous midwives and Baloch women. In meditating on colonial ruination, the feminist theorist and anthropologist of coloniality, Anne Stoler described the persistence of “imperial formations through material debris,” or the remnants of colonial governance and discourse that continue to degrade the material environments in which people live, and their sensible and moral experiences of the world. I extend this idea to consider the postcolonial continuity and ramifications of the colonial debris—the co-presence of biomedicine (hospitals/clinics, injections, personnel) and the enduring powers of state and transnational institutional discourses about people such as the dais or “traditional birth attendants (TBAs)”—and Baloch women’s and dhinabogs’ affective responses to their contingent materialization.  

2. Shifting Cervical Cancer Care in the Era of molecular medicine and the institutionalization of the human papilloma virus (HPV) preventive technologies.

As a postdoctoral research fellow with the Swiss Network for Mobilities Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zürich (2009-2012), I developed my ideas for my second book tentatively titled, Biopolitics of Reproductive Technologies Beyond the Clinic: Remaking Adolescents in the Era of Molecular Biology. For this project, I initiated a new ethnographic research project in India, Switzerland, and the United States to investigate the effects of the globalization of HPV vaccine on Indian women’s health, cervical cancer prevention efforts, and India’s public health care system. Phase one of the project investigated the links between the innovations in the molecular biology of cervical cancer and the rise of the HPV-vaccine and how this is reconfiguring global reproductive health policies and public health care practices in India. My fieldwork in several Indian cities and rural areas in 2009, 2011, and 2012 traced the simultaneous emergence of the HPV vaccine and global health cervical cancer prevention programs, in the context of the shifting nexus between biomedicine, biotechnologies, the state, and population health care there. I examined some of the public health and scientific claims as well as the policy and institutional arrangements crafted to facilitate the flow of the vaccine and localize its distribution in rural and urban Indian locales through the public health system. (For preliminary findings see: Towghi 2013; Towghi and Randeria 2013). I am currently developing Phase II of this research that aims to study how the introduction of the HPV vaccine and HPV screening technologies in clinical settings is mediating pre-existing cervical cancer prevention and therapeutic practices and the hospital preventive services that are inceasinlgy linked to public health community outreach efforts in the global South countries such as India. 

3. Gynaecological Surgeries: An Intercultural History of the Present. With Historian A/Professor Alison Moore (Western Sydney University) and Dr Tinashe Dune (Wester Sydney University) -- see pilot study for this project: doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2021.1987232

Teaching and Student Supervision

I joined ANU in December 2016 with 10 years of prior undergraduate and postgraduate teaching experience in Anthropology; Gender & Women's Studies; and Ethnic Studies at the University California, Berkeley; California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco; San Francisco State University; Santa Clara University; and University of Zurich. 

From 2016 to 2022 as a full time permanent Lecturer at the ANU I taught the following courses at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology:

CHMD8006 Global Health & Development (PG) (in 2017; 2019-2022).

CHMD8021 Indigenous Medicines, Health, & Healing (PG) (in 2018, 2019, 2022).

ANTH 3059/8059 Doing Ethnography (UG/PG) (in 2022).

ANTH2130/6516 Violence and Terror (UG/PG) (in 2021)

CHMD8022: Anthropology of biomedical technologies in practice (PG). (2020, 2018, 2019)

ANTH2138/6138: Doing Medical Anthropology (UG) (2017-2018)

I have supervised PhD, MA and Honours students wishing to engage the broad areas of medical anthropology and/or feminist science and technology studies in their respective research. I have also  mentored students interested in: the transnational application of theories of race and gender; the cultural politics of globalization of biomedicine and biotechnologies; the study of the relationship between kinship, sexuality, and reproductive technologies; developing an expertise in the anthropology of reproduction; Indigenous medicines, health, and healing; the role of humanitarianism in international/global health and in relation to migration and refugee health and rights, and the anthropology of South Asia. 

Student projects

Doctoral Projects

2021-- Maksuda Khanam/ The experience of middle-class women during and after caesarean deliveries: Bangladesh Context (ANU Scholarship) see ANU University Research Scholarship 

2020-- Mohammad Ibrahim Khalad/ Understanding the perception of masculinity among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Research Ethics Approval: 2021/117. (ANU scholarship)

2018-2022 Nur Newaz Khan/ Cultural economy of unlicensed biomedical practices in Bangladesh: Exploring beyond formal-informal dichotomy in relation to policy and pharmaceutical influence. Research Ethics Approval: 2019/609. (ANU scholarship)-

2017--Ruonan Chen/ Making hospitals in Tibet. Research Ethics Approval 2018/682. (Co-supervision with Dr Trang Ta)

Panel Member-Associate Supervision

2021 Sirirak Aratrakorn/  Tattooing practice for snakebite in the northeast of Thailand: knowledge transformation and the folk healer’s life in the world of contemporary biomedicine. ANU college of Medicine, Biology and Environment 

Masters Projects 

2021-- Clair Bizhao Zhang/ Nurturing Life: How Empty Nose Syndrome Sufferers Make Live in Post-reform China (Master of Anthropology)

2021 Sabine Kane/ The Impact of Endometriosis on Interpersonal Relationships. (Master of Anthropology)

2021 Kate Eve/ Safety and spiritual care - what do they mean for each other in Australian hospitals? (Master of Culture Health and Medicine) Ethics Approval: 2021/070. 

2021 Yugi Zhuang/ High-quality bodies to make up high-quality China? HPV vaccine,corporeal politics, and the neoliberal management of self. Master of Culture, Health, and Medicine—High Distinction. Ethics Protocol: 2019/772.

2020 Jessica Stone/ Mind, body and community: A study of yoga for mental wellbeing in the Syrian refugee settlements of Lebanon. Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development. High Distinction. Ethics Protocol: 2019/688 

2020 Kylie Murray/ Research in the down-under-ground: An alter-politics for a liveable future. Master of Anthropology—High Distinction. Ethics Protocol 2019/413 

2019 Susan Braun/ Ethnographic analysis of representations of the ‘Asmat Health Crisis’, Papua Province, Indonesia.Master of Culture Health and Medicine-Ethics protocol 2018/832 & 2019/428

2019 Ali Sweeney/ Constructing the “Risky Other”: How “Anti-vaxxers” are used to define the self. Master of Culture, Health and Medicine- High Distinction Human Research Ethics 2018/832.

2019 Xing Wang/ Enveloped by Hope: “Yiliao Pianju” (Health Fraud Scam), Health Care and Regimes of Living in Post-reform China. Master of Anthropology- High Distinction

Pre-ANU Doctoral supervision

Primary advisor of following Ph.D. candidates during my faculty tenure in the Department of Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral studies, San Francisco, USA

Cynthia Gonzalez, Ph.D. (2014) Watts, Our Town: 'Nothing About Us, Without Us, Is For US': An Autoethnographic Account of Life in Watts, California

Natalie Cox, Ph.D. (2016) The Burdens of Bureaucracy: African Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in San Francisco

Destiny Thomas, Ph.D. (2016) Black Thrivance and Why #BlackLivesMatter: Interrogating The Black Plight Narrative, Resisting Black Death

Terri Sé Sullivan. Ph.D. (2016) Conversion Therapy Ground Zero: Interrogating the Production of Gender as a Pathology in the United States