Piyush Pushkar

I am a physician-anthropologist. For my clinical work, I am training in forensic psychiatry in North West England. I completed my PhD in the anthropology department of the University of Manchester in 2021, and am now designing a new project focusing on mentally unwell offenders.

The title of my PhD thesis, submitted and defended in 2021, was: Imagining the NHS: Politics and protest in the moral economy of NHS activism.  The thesis is of deep relevance to the challenges that face healthcare professionals, patients, citizens and the people charged with conceiving and executing health policy. I was interested in the politics of the NHS; why does it incite so much passion amongst the public? 

I did ethnographic research with political activists campaigning against cuts and privatisation in the NHS. For them, the NHS was a "moral example", a symbol of actually existing socialism. They developed a collective vision of how the state ought to and could intervene to create a good society. I demonstrated how these activists went into battle with the proponents of public service reforms, forming alliances with other groups on the basis of their interpretation of the meaning of the NHS.

Outputs from my PhD have been published in Medical Anthropology and Critical Public Health. Further articles and chapters are forthcoming and I am working on a book manuscript.

My new project will explore the role that guilt and shame play in psychiatric assessment and management of mentally unwell offenders. For this research I plan to do interviews with clinicians and legal workers, as well as participant-observation in forensic healthcare settings.