Labors of the flesh
The ethical, ecological and emotional entanglements of “the first 1000 days of life”
Recent biomedical studies on stunting and anemia in Bhutan suggest the need for careful qualitative research on potential frictions between maternal and child nutrition interventions and the occupational, neighborhood, kinship, and cosmological practices that shape how people eat, drink, or move during the first 1000 days. In this project, I follow scientists, policymakers, health workers, and nutrition intervention participants as they translate this global health policy agenda in and out of clinical spaces. I do so with multi-sited, multimodal, and multi-temporal fieldwork with colleagues based in Kanglung, Bhutan. In the process, we hope to complicate the relationship between growing the human and growing the economy during a time of climate crisis – as well as experiment with non-colonial feminist science.