URSULA RAO is Director of the Department “Anthropology of Politics and Governance” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Her current research focuses on e-governance and the social consequences of digital governance especially for re-making the welfare state in India. In the past, Ursula Rao has also written on Hindi- and English journalism, urban space and ritual theory. She is co-editor of “Bodies as Evidence. Power, Knowledge, Security” (Duke University Press, 2018, together Mark Maguire and Nils Zurawski). Other recent publications are “Policy as experimentation. Failing ‘forward’ towards universal health coverage in India” (Social Anthropology 30(2): 81–100), and “Making informal sacred geographies. Spiritual presence, sensual engagement, and wayside shrines in urban India” (Space and Culture 26(2): 192-203).
Ursula Rao is currently working on a manuscript with the working title "Aspirational technology, ailing bodies and the attempt to make health insurable in India". The book follows the story of the creation of India's first nationwide, publicly funded health insurance scheme for people living below the poverty line, focusing on its humble beginnings in the 2010s and its subsequent growth, and tracing the work of solving a wicked problem through today's most fashionable solution, digital technology. What are the fantasies that animate the new megaproject, the manoeuvres that operationalize it, the shifts that make it endure, and the experiences of those who should benefit from it? Animated by the question of how a policy can be both a success and a failure, it theorizes the limits of governability as well as the stubborn will to ignore them.
Please tune in on September 25, 2024, where Ursula will be giving the following talk: Clashing Temporalities: The ordinary Struggles of Reconciling Patient Care with Infrastructure Planning in an Indian E-Goverance Program.
Event details: 4:30 - 6:00 pm | Cohen Hall 402 | 249 S. 36th Street