Demographic Desires

Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton is a Senior Lecturer at the interdisciplinary School of Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Trained as a feminist medical anthropologist and STS Scholar (with a PhD in cultural studies) she has co-edited (w/Bennett) Methods, Moments, and Ethnographic Spaces in Asia (2021) and (w/ Van Hollen) A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology (2023). Most recently, in light of COVID-19, she has been working collaboratively to research and write over a dozen articles about the experiences withing diverse communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is part of a collaboration that has been thinking and writing about COVID-19 since its very start and the collaboration is called CARUL (Care And Responsibility Under Lockdown). She has also individually written about 'the bubble' in NZ as new public health vocabulary and 'looking away' in India as a complex COVID-19 reality.

She has published in leading academic journals (Anthropology and Medicine, American Anthropologist, Economic and Political Weekly, to list but three) and non-academic public facing news platforms (The Hindu, The Wire, The Citizen, again, to just list three). She serves on numerous academic publishing/journal editorial boards, including Science, Technology, and Human Value (STHV). She is also the recipient of the New Zealand Royal Society's Marden Fast Start grant (2023) which is focused on researching the Social Lives of Sex Hormones: Our Hormones, Our Selves in Aotearoa New Zealand.