Select Works
Embodied Measuring (Accepted), 2025
in ‘Living Well with Diabetes’, University Toronto Press
an edited volume by Jessica Hardin and Emily Mendenhall featuring accessibly written, ethnographically rich stories of living with metabolic health conditions from across the world.
This chapter explores how people with type 2 diabetes in middle-class South India navigate biomedical control by cultivating 'embodied measuring' ; blending subjective awareness of their body's blood sugar levels with objective metrics. Through the case study of the my mother, it highlights the balance between personal sensibilities and medical measurements in managing diabetes and living well with the condition.
The Taste of Homemade: Trusting ‘Healthy’ Food in App-Based Delivery Services in Hyderabad, 2024
This article explores how IT-employed households with type 2 diabetes in Hyderabad, India, determine trustworthy online food through ‘embodied knowing,’ a visceral sense of the food’s quality and the intentions of its maker. It highlights how apps leverage class, gender, and relational trust by evoking motherly figures to market home-style food as ‘safe’ and ‘healthy,’ thereby blurring the boundary between home and outside food.
Peer-reviewed article in Journal of Cultural Economy, part of a Special Issue on ‘Digital Eating’ edited by Jeremy Brice, Tanja Schneider and Karin Eli
Outwitting the Temporalities of ‘Control’ for Type 2 Diabetes in Urban India, 2022
Podcast by the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity at the University of Oxford
This episode examines how urban Indians with type 2 diabetes, disillusioned by the biomedical framing of the condition as a lifelong illness requiring constant management, engage in practices of reversal. These practices, which focus on bodily attunement through medication reduction, dietary changes, and herbal supplements, promise an end to diabetes by subverting biomedical time regimes. By re-imagining time and health as a process of self-improvement, reversal redefines diabetes management from endless control to a more holistic approach centered on the body's own rhythms.
Policing Pleasure: Colonialism and Reversing Diabetes in Hyderabad, 2023
Podcast by Nutrire CoLab, a collective of feminist scholars of food and metabolic health.
Prof Megan Warin interviews Pallavi Laxmikanth about her dissertation research on diabetes and nutritional colonialism in Hyderabad. Pallavi explores how people with type 2 diabetes outwit biomedical and dietary forms of governance to reverse their illness. Using a phenomenological and STS inspired lens, she examines the colonial origins of biochemical and dietary measurements, and the sensual and affective dimensions of their presence in modern nutritional agendas. She demonstrates how measuring comes to be embodied by people with diabetes, as a means to contend with colonial and capitalist forms of indexing foods and bodies. Her interest in the intersection between food and health, is inspired by her previous work experience in the food industry in India.
Baking My Way Through Ethnography: Cakey Encounters With Diabetes During a Pandemic, 2021
Short Form Piece published in Open-Access Blog, Ethnographic Marginalia, edited by Sneha Annavarapu and Alexa
This article creatively explores how the act of baking cakes for research participants evolved into a meaningful tool for understanding how people with diabetes relate to taste, sweetness, and pleasure post-diagnosis. Initially intended as a gesture of thanks, the cakes became a medium for shared experiences, deepening connections and transforming into a collective project that redefined the participants' relationship with diabetes.
The Dangers of Taste: Mango Pleasures and the Outwitting of Colonial Disgust, 2021
Paper presentation at the Australian Anthropological Society’s annual conference, held online due to COVID-19.
This presentation argues that colonial-era performances of ‘disgust’ toward culturally significant foods like mangoes have influenced modern dietary protocols, particularly for people with diabetes, who are warned against eating them due to their sweetness. Tracing the mango’s rich history and symbolic importance in India, the presentation suggests that colonial attitudes have been rationalized into nutritional science, perpetuating racialized control over dietary choices and framing ‘taste,’ especially sweetness, as a site of political and biomedical regulation.
Fall of the Pineapple: From Deccan symbol of prestige to deathly fruit, 2021
Article published in Hyderabad-based news outlet Siasat.
Pineapples are originally native to the lowlands of South America and were claimed to be ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1493. They were brought to India by the Portuguese when Goa was colonised in 1510, and it eventually reached other places here. For the Deccan Sultans, like the Qutb Shahis of the Golconda dynasty (1518-1687), the pineapple was an important symbol of wealth, hospitality and abundance. One can find pineapple motifs on the Charminar, and its design elements on almost every Qutb Shahi or Golconda era tomb….
Security and Skills: the two key issues in health worker migration, 2014
Co-authored peer-reviewed journal article published in Global Health Action
This article highlights how the migration of health workers from Africa, particularly from South Africa, undermines the universal provision of quality healthcare. Despite efforts to reduce the outflow, many health workers continue migrating to high-income countries, while South Africa fills the gap by recruiting from its lower-income neighbors. The article calls for a deeper understanding of the motivations behind migration and post-migration experiences to inform policies that improve retention and encourage the return of health workers to their home countries
‘You can't stay away from your family’: a qualitative study of the ongoing ties and future plans of South African health workers in the United Kingdom
Co-authored peer-reviewed journal article published in Global Health Action
This article addresses how the migration of African-trained health workers to countries with higher healthcare worker densities exacerbates the severe shortage of personnel in African nations. While many studies focus on the reasons for migration, there is limited evidence to guide policies that encourage health workers to return home or support their home country's healthcare system in other ways.
Why sub-Saharan African health workers migrate to European countries that do not actively recruit: a qualitative study post-migration, 2014
Co-authored peer-reviewed journal article published in Global Health Action
This article explores the migration of health workers from sub-Saharan Africa to Belgium and Austria, countries without a history of actively recruiting from the region. While many studies focus on migration driven by international recruitment, this paper examines the reasons behind migration outside of that paradigm, offering new insights into the motivations of health workers who choose to relocate to these European countries.