School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a Senior Lecturer at the Global Health Policy Unit within Social Policy at the School of Social and Political Science, and Associate Director of GENDER.ED, the university's hub for gender and sexualities. 

My work lies between critical public health, anthropology and sociology. I have done fieldwork in the UK, with minoritised South Asian populations, and in Indian and Pakistani Punjab. I work on intersectional inequalities in health and work; family and intimate life; and relationships between health and family. I also engage in wider collaborative research, leading lines of inquiry around intersectional inequalities and coloniality.

My first research strand on intersectional inequalities in health and work addresses the ways in which structures of racial capitalism, patriarchy and coloniality come together to injure health and economic chances. The monograph from my doctoral research, undertaken with minoritised Pakistani people in East London, addresses how histories of migration and deindustrialization are manifest and remembered in disproportionate and premature chronic illness. How people are weathered by gendered labours, reproductive burdens and inequitable healthcare. How gendered, racialised and classed experiences of incapacity from work relate to changing labour market structures, and shape care and dependency within families. How the UK government has responded to such structured inequality with individualising and even stigmatising policies. In later collaborative work, I took forward these analyses via work on how these inequalities were experienced during the covid19 pandemic in UK. As part of this research strand I have also worked on how food industry practices in Peterborough disadvantage migrant food processing workers. I am currently embarking on new collaborative research on how ultra-processed food, and other unhealthy commodity industries that are vectors of chronic disease are targeting global South populations. 

My second research strand addresses how gender, racialisation, migration and class come together to shape aspects of family and intimate life. I worked with diasporic Indian Punjabi families in the UK, and in locations of out-migration in Punjab, on the power dynamics of marriage migration, the moralities of transnational parenting and education, transnational childhoods and youth transitions, and the gendered, generational and racialised dynamics of the associational life people have developed to enable these. Returning to South Asian Muslim families in East London and Peterborough, I undertook fieldwork focussed on propensities to marital instability, how legal pluralism may compromise women's rights within separation and divorce, economic aspects of marital dissolution and divorce-extended families, how repartnering is embedded in intersecting forms of discrimination, and how the sexual politics of the family are policed, disrupted and represented. My work under this research strand is reflected in my second monograph.

My third research strand looks at how the dynamics of families influence health and vice versa. My UK work has addressed how unhappy or violent family life becomes injurious to health. The gendered and generational pinchpoints in families which shape the giving and taking of care. My later work in Pakistani Punjab addresses how women's health and healthcare access are mediated through the dynamics of kinship and marriage. Looping back to the first research strand, I am currently writing a book on how social positioning differentiates, as well as relationally connects Pakistani women's reproductive health and labour.

The mainstay of my work is critical ethnography, which synthesises the testimony and actions of interlocutors within wider contexts, histories and structures. I have co-authored work on the use of anthropological methods to study population health, health policy, and families and intimate life.

I love teaching. At Edinburgh I convene/co-convene the courses 'Health and human rights' and 'Gender and development'. I lecture on 'Anthropology of global health', 'Anthropology of health and migration', 'Understanding infectious disease', 'Global politics of public health', 'Population health and health policy', 'South Asia in the world', 'South Asia: culture, politics, economy', 'Race, power and social policy', 'Researching health and policy: quantitative methods' and on various qualitative research methods courses. I am excited about supervising postgraduate research connected to health equity and gender justice. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and am interested in responsive pedagogies, as I discuss here. 

I am on the Editorial Collective of Medicine, Anthropology, Theory. As part of an anti-extractive approach towards reading in terms of feminist solidarity, as I discuss here, I also write reviews for a variety of journals.

Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh in 2019, I taught medical sociology and medical anthropology at the University of St Andrews and the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Before that I was a research fellow at Oxford and Sussex universities. My doctoral and postgraduate education was from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Prior to my academic posts, I worked for Options, the research consultancy wing of Marie Stopes International, and for various research consultancies in the fields of sexual and reproductive health and rights, population and development in Pakistan.

Key publications

Jeffery, P. and K. Qureshi (eds.) (2024) 'Muslim Woman'/Muslim women: Lived Experiences beyond Religion and Gender in South Asia and Its Diasporas. London: Routledge. Formerly published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.

Qureshi, K. and M. Tichenor (eds.) (2024) Anthropologies of health policy. Special issue of Anthropology & Medicine.

Pooley, S. and K. Qureshi (eds.) (second edition 2022, first edition 2016) Parenthood between generations: transforming reproductive cultures. Oxford: Berghahn.

Petit, V., K. Qureshi, Y. Charbit and P. Kreager (eds.) (2020) The anthropological demography of health. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Qureshi, K. (2019) Chronic illness in a Pakistani labour diaspora. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Qureshi, K. and E. Rahman (eds.) (2017) Infant feeding: medicalization, the state and techniques of the body. Special section of Women's Studies International Forum.

Qureshi, K. (2016) Marital breakdown among British Asians. London: Palgrave.