Lecture | Research Seminar
CADS Spotlight: Shajeela Shawkat & James McGrail
- Shajeela Shawkat & James McGrail
- Date
- Monday 2 June 2025
- Time
- Address
-
FSW building
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 5A42
Shajeela's Talk
The Dynamics of Caregiving and the Relational Construction of Personhood in Spinal Cord Injury
This chapter explores how caregiving in the context of spinal cord injury (SCI) rehabilitation in Bangalore, India, becomes a site for the continuous negotiation of personhood, moral obligation, and emotional reciprocity. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Bengaluru Rehabilitation Center (BRC), in private homes, and through digital platforms, this research explores caregiving as a primary terrain through which social roles, identities, and futures are collaboratively made and unmade. My multimodal methodology included participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and participatory art workshops with SCI individuals, their caregivers, and peer mentors.
Care in SCI settings involves more than assistance with the body; it requires constant emotional calibration, where both caregivers and care receivers negotiate their roles under the weight of cultural expectations and practical dependencies. People with SCI often conceal distress, modulate their moods, pay acute attention to bodily attunement, and ration their requests to avoid burdening their caregivers, revealing that care is not unidirectional. Meanwhile, family caregivers, often women, navigate layered expectations, constraints, and the weight of visibility, silence, and shame. Professional caregivers, introduce new dynamics of trust, instruction, and emotional fatigue, which SCI individuals must manage in addition to their bodily needs.
Care unfolds here not as a linear progression toward independence, but as a dense, improvisational choreography marked by pain, endurance, humor, and refusal. Participants engage in relational becoming, where autonomy and dependency are not opposites but entangled states negotiated through care. By foregrounding caregiving as a generative and negotiated process, this research contributes to broader conversations in medical anthropology around care infrastructures, and the social meanings of health. Rather than viewing care as a background condition, I argue it is central to how recovery is imagined, practiced, and lived.
About Shajeela
S. Shajeela Shawkat is currently part of the ERC-funded project Globalizing Palliative Care, where her research focuses on the care trajectories of individuals with spinal cord injuries, supported by fieldwork conducted at a rehabilitation center in Bangalore, India.
She completed her Master’s degree from Leiden University in the Netherlands, where her thesis investigated diversity within the Computer Science faculty. During her time at Leiden, she also worked as a tutor for one year. Prior to this, she completed her Bachelor’s degree at BRAC University in Bangladesh, conducting fieldwork that examined the construction of hijra identity among hijra sex workers in Dhaka.
In addition, Shajeela has four years of experience in the non-profit sector in Bangladesh, where she was involved in designing schools for marginalized communities and worked as a high school teacher for one year.
James' Talk
Since Singapore's independence in the 1960s, the People’s Action Party (PAP) has claimed that its political platform is driven by pragmatism, not ideology. This approach to governance aligns well with the big-data revolution, which promises to rationalise and automate government processes. It is a promise that the Singaporean state has embraced with zeal, launching its Smart Nation initiative in 2014, which aims to extract vast amounts of data from across the island. With the introduction of large language models (LLMs), it is argued that big data can be transformed into policy with the click of a button. As a result, Singapore has integrated AI at every level of government. The country has invested heavily in OpenAI, incorporated AI into the software used by civil servants, and offered grants to government departments and state-owned enterprises to incorporate AI into their operations. This includes the Islamic religious authority, MUIS, which received both grant money and support from Google to create an AI Fatwa bot. With the help of this bot, MUIS hopes to speed up the process of issuing religious rulings and reassert its religious authority. The future of Singapore is increasingly intertwined with big data and AI.
However, despite the PAP's political monopoly, alternative visions of the future continue to thrive. In this presentation, I will explore how Singapore’s Muslim community challenges the logics of big data, speaks back to AI, and envisions alternative futures in a country known for its censorship and surveillance. What futures exist in Singapore beyond the techno-determinist vision proposed by the state?
About James
James McGrail is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. He is a member of the NWO funded One Among Zeroes research project. As part of the project his research focuses on how AI changes the way Muslims in Singapore imagine the future. He is particularly focused on how new technologies shape governance. James is a multimodal ethnographer who utilises a range of methods including zine-making, annotation and sonic ethnography. Through these methods he hopes to explore aspects of technology, and futuring which are less tangible, from underground cables, to imagined futures.