Jaya Mathur
New Delhi, Delhi| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowships |
| Project Title: | Evidence, differences and the clinic: Ethnographic reflections on chronic pain medicine in India |
| Field of Study: | Sociology |
| Home Institution: | Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi |
| Host Institution: | Boston University , Boston, MA |
| Grant Start Month: | September 2025 |
| Duration of Grant: | Nine months |
Brief Bio:
Ms. Jaya Mathur is a PhD Candidate at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She holds an MA in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a BA in philosophy from Hindu College, University of Delhi. Her research interests include ethnographic and historical studies of evidentiality and truth-making practices in medicine, cultures of expertise, practices of the body and quantification, patient-centeredness, global pharmaceutical trajectories, medical technologies, and contested disease categories.
She has worked as a researcher with public health and health policy projects examining urban women’s experiences with assisted reproduction, social inequality and access to medicinal substances among Adivasi communities in central India, and the role of unqualified medical practitioners in rural healthcare. As an associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Jaya studied how technologies and practices of digital health re-configured forms of medical and psychological expertise.
For her PhD, Jaya explores how non-cancer chronic pain is constituted as a diagnostic and therapeutic category in biomedicine amidst conditions of epistemic and ontological uncertainty. To this end, she documents the translational, ethical and relational thinking as well as labor undertaken by medical experts in collaboration with their patients.
During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship, Jaya is affiliated to the Department of Sociology at Boston University, working with Prof. Jane Pryma. She is expanding her research on the varying strains of expertise mobilized around chronic pain, and the medicalization of pain in India and the U.S.