My academic work grapples at the broadest level, with the relationship between senses, bodies, and politics. As a scholar of medicine, I am interested in the relationship between medicine and violence -- the violence that is inherent in medicine, and how political violence reshapes medicine.

My academic work on these subjects can be downloaded at https://ucsd.academia.edu/SaibaVarma

Touch in Digitized Worlds

co-authored with Tuva B. Broch

The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. Ethnographically, the articles gathered offer intimate accounts of tactile experiences that intertwine with the digital in both direct and indirect ways. Despite ongoing—and often legitimate—anxieties about the disappearance of touch from our increasingly digitized world, our special issue shows that human engagements with digital technologies are more complex. We theorize touch through a phenomenological and relational lens and as a sensory experience that is deeply shaped and reconfigured by local, sociotechnical and political-economic concerns. This special issue illuminates how attention to hands, fingers, or touch can help us understand the relationship between bodies, ethical life, social relations, selves, and subjectivities through a new lens.

Troubling Complicities: the anthropologist as (im)moral subject

co-authored with Kali Rubaii

This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call "bearing witness" and "denunciation/confession." In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided dialogue, we demonstrate the multiple responsibilities and relationalities that come with the positions we occupy as subjects, researchers, and narrators of empire. We define complicity as an active, transitive engagement with others as we are situated in multiple structures of power. Theorizing complicity helps us reveal what relations of knowledge and power we are responsible for making visible and how we can analytically respond to them. By pluralizing complicity, our aim is to stimulate much needed conversation on questions of anthropology's relation to tentacles of empire.

Militarism, Psychiatry and Social Impunity in Kashmir

This chapter explores psychiatric care and public health in Kashmir through the concept of “social impunity,” to give voice to patient experiences and resistances under state occupation and
sociomedical control.

The Work of Ambivalence: Autonomy, Collaboration and Care in the Neoliberal US University

co-authored by Star Fem Co-Lab

Can science be feminist? Can feminist science emerge from and take hold within the neoliberal university? This article makes the case for a vision of feminist science that brings together feminist theory with scientific research and social studies of science to retool and reclaim scientific knowledge production by and for social justice imperatives to redirect power, resources, and knowledge to benefit communities most impacted by imperialistic science and its histories.

Medicine's Shadowsides: Revisiting Clinical Iatrogenesis

co-edited with Emma Varley

Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on iatrogenesis that does not limit it to medical explanations alone, nor locate harm in singular points in time. These papers attend to iatrogenesis’ immediate and lingering presences in socialities and structures within and beyond medicine, and the ways it reflects or reproduces the racism, sexism, and ableism built into medical logics.