Suicide is universally human yet culturally and contextually specific. In this talk, Dr Jocelyn Chua will explore this central tension through anthropological methods and questions. How has the discipline of anthropology, particularly its use of ethnographic methodologies, contributed to our understanding of suicide? Drawing on insights from her previous research on suicide in Kerala and highlighting anthropologists' involvement in community-based and intervention studies, she will offer one perspective on the discipline’s approaches to self-harm and self-inflicted death, as well as its potential for multidisciplinary collaboration.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr Jocelyn Chua
Dr Jocelyn Chua is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States. Trained as a medical anthropologist, she employs qualitative ethnographic methods to explore the social, political, and economic dimensions of health, illness, and well-being. She is the author of In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India (2014), based on over two years of research in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, examining the everyday lived realities of suicide in India’s so-called “Model of Development.”
