SHARE Profile: Dr Sonali Sathaye
What is your role in the SHARE project?
As an anthropologist, I participate in the work of WP 1 overseen by Dr Manjulika Vaz, at St John's Research Institute in Bangalore, India. WP 1 deals with the creation of qualitative research material and with assessing the epistemic, cultural and practical suitability of tools. Over the last months research assistant Akriti Muthanna and I have been experimenting with tweaking the original questionnaire, experimenting with, for example, exploring the ways in which personal stories intersect with professional values when it comes to sustainability in the research context. As part of the Indian team, I also participate in WP 3 which focusses on cross-cultural research.
What brought you to SHARE?
My doctoral dissertation in Cultural Anthropology focussed on notions of self and emotion in mainstream American culture. I found that an emphasis on autonomy led directly - paradoxically - to an acceptance of scientific authority, especially when mediated through capitalism. The question of what undergirds it - the assumption of objectivity invoked by a focus on the measurable and material - arose naturally from that study. Later, I wrote on the advent of the mental health industry in India, both in corporations (through "soft-skills" programmes) and in more civil settings (through "life skills" programmes). Here too I found that Science, as an epistemic enterprise, was typically used to bolster and add lustre to theories and techniques.
Ecology and its relationship with culture having always been a concern, I taught a course on Planetary Health over a period of five years in the online Master's in Global Public Health degree offered by Queen Mary's University of London (QMUL). Our course emphasised the degree to which the climate crisis, far from primarily being a scientific/technological problem, has its roots in questions of value (particularly when routed through the current economic system).
These varied investigations seem to me to have converged nicely in the SHARE project, with its emphasis on qualitative, cross-cultural research, health, environment, and critical investigation of science and its practice.
What do you bring to the SHARE project?
I bring my sense of urgency for the need to incorporate planetary health in all aspects of the health industry as well as a deep commitment to qualitative research. Qualitative research offers a systematic and careful route to understanding situated context without which no lasting change is possible. In addition, I bring a long standing engagement with the project of decolonising epistemic frameworks - a project and process which I hope will reveal itself clearly over the course of this particular research study.
What excites you about this project?
I am delighted to work on a multi-cultural, multi-national project on health research and sustainability in a truly non hierarchical and inclusive environment. Thus far, our discussions have sometimes been wide ranging and always great fun, reflecting our different contexts and realities. Long may that continue!