Dr. Sheela Saravanan

Dr. Sheela Saravanan

Position

• Research associate

Contact information

Heidelberg University
South Asia Institute
Department of Anthropology
Im Neuenheimer Feld 330, Room 502
69120 Heidelberg
Germany

DFG project "Wunschkinder"
E-Mail: sheela.saravanan@uni-heidelberg.de
Phone: +49 6221 54-8848

Short biography

Dr. Sheela Saravanan has two Master’s degrees from the Indian Universities of Bombay and Pune in Geography and Development Planning. Her PhD thesis in Public Health from Queensland University of Technology, Australia was on the influence of biomedical frameworks of knowledge on local birthing practices in India. She has worked and published on the status of reproductive health in South Asia, violence against women and female infanticide in India. Since 2009 her research work in the German Universities of Heidelberg and Goettingen has focused on gender and assisted reproductive technologies in the context of Asia and Europe. She has widely published on commercial surrogacy in India from a feminist, global inequalities and reproductive justice perspective. Theoretically she has drawn on critical medical anthropology; Lock and Scheper-Hughes ‘mindful body’, theories of global justice and feminist theories of reproductive justice, transnational feminism and intersectionality in the context of commercial surrogacy in India. In her PhD thesis, she applied Jordan’s (1993) concept of ‘authoritative knowledge’ to assess the extent to which there is a synthesis of both biomedical and locally practiced knowledge in the design and content of TBA (Traditional Birth Attendant) training in India. She is presently working on a DFG funded project titled ‘A study of ‘desired children’ in Germany and India as a context leading to prenatal genetic diagnosis and selective abortions’. In this research on prenatal diagnosis she has applied Lock and Scheper-Hughes ‘mindful body’ in examining the notions of Wunschkinder in Germany and India. She has been teaching ‘Theories and Practice and Socio-ethics of Assisted Reproductive Technologies’, ‘Feminism and Public Health’ and ‘Gendered Embodiment of Complementary Medicine’ to Master’s and Bachelor students at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University.