Sajida Ally (PhD) is Lecturer in Anthropology and Global Health in the Department of Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School (BMS). At BMS, she works as part of a qualitative team to support the ResPharm research on the effects of pharmaceutical waste on environmental and human health and AMR in India. Sajida’s independent research interests lie broadly in phenomenological and socio-cultural dimensions of illness/wellness experience, inequality and the politics of healthcare access, and the anthropology of migration and social change. She has a decade of ethnographic research experience in Sri Lanka and Kuwait, and prior extensive expertise in migration policy research and advocacy across Asia and the Arab Gulf. These research proficiencies shape her current teaching of global health and qualitative health research at BMS to students in the iBSc, MBChB, and public ‘short course’ programmes.
For the ResPharm project, she coordinates and supports the work of the ‘Qualitative Team’ that is led by Professor Helen Lambert at BMS and Professor Manmeet Kaur at PGIMER in Chandigarh, India. The team is working collectively to document practices and living conditions associated with human exposure to pharmaceutical waste and people’s perceptions of the health risks involved, antibiotic-related treatment practices, and the structural drivers of exposure. Sajida’s work involves providing remote support to PGIMER’s on-the-ground research through leading the team in planning methodology, designing research tools, and analysing emerging qualitative data.
Sajida is also the PI of a NYU-Abu Dhabi-funded project that examines the politics of Sri Lankan migrants’ healthcare access in Kuwait across class, ethnic and religious lines and a Research Associate in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow at Sussex and Lecturer in Global Public Health at Queen Mary University of London. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex, her MSc in Social Policy, Planning and Development from the LSE, and her BA in History and Arab Studies from Georgetown University.
