Welcome to the Hematopolitics Research Network! We’re a group of interdisciplinary scholars whose research focuses on all aspects of blood, its donation, its transfusion, and much more.
Join the Network
By becoming a member of the network, you’ll be featured on our project website, receive bi-monthly newsletters, and be the first to hear about exciting updates. To join the network, email us at hematopolitics@leeds.ac.uk with a short biography (max. 250 words) and a link to your institutional profile (where applicable).
Our Members
Emily Avera (Colgate University)
Emily Avera is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University. Her research incorporates the sociocultural dimensions of health, race and racialization in medicine, the semiotics of blood, the intersections between medical and linguistic anthropology, and science and technology studies, with a focus on transplant and transfusion medicine, primarily in South Africa and in other global health contexts. Her current book project in development, Fluid Identities: Risk, Residue and Race in South African Blood Services, is based on over two years of qualitative ethnographic fieldwork with the blood services in South Africa and engages with the multiple meanings of blood as both material and metaphor.
Jenny Bangham (University of Edinburgh)
Jenny Bangham is a lecturer in the history of medicine in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh. Her research addresses how 20th- and 21st-century scientific and medical practices have reciprocally shaped the social and political conditions of peoples’ lives. Her first project dealt with the mid-twentieth century politics of human blood, and her resulting book, Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics (Chicago 2020), follows how human genetics was intimately connected to the practices and cultures of wartime blood transfusion. Her two subsequent projects—funded by a Wellcome Medical Humanities Fellowship in Cambridge and a Wellcome University Award at Queen Mary—extended questions that arose from her first book: How do materiality and affect shape knowledge? How are ‘race’ and gender embedded in science and medicine? How is care made central to scientific collections? How is scientific and medical knowledge made meaningful to peoples’ lives?
Samiksha Bhan (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Samiksha Bhan is currently pursuing her Phd in the department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. Her research focuses on genetic knowledge production, racialization of risk, and health politics in Southern-Central India. Taking the case of inherited blood disorders, her project asks how genetic risk mapped onto historically marginalised communities intersects with colonial anthropology, family planning and population control programmes, and global health policy that in turn shapes illness experience, care work, and political subjectivities for disease-affected families. Before joining the Max Planck, Samiksha was an MPhil scholar at the University of Hyderabad where she wrote a thesis on the post-genomic turn in life sciences from the perspective of history and philosophy of biology. She also holds an MA in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, and remains passionate about Deccan history and Persianate cultures, health and political activism, and public science platforms in India.
Jacob Copeman (University of Santiago de Compostela)
A social anthropologist of South Asia, Jacob Copeman’s research interests are mainly connected to the anthropologies of substance-exchange and religion, with a focus on blood donation and transfusion, Sikh traditions, secularity, naming practices and guru figures. He is PI on an ERC Consolidator Grant, ‘Religion and Its Others in South Asia and the World’, which examines the forms in which individuals and communities raise, in the open or in more hidden transcripts, questions over the dominant religious norms in South Asia. His research has also been funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. His most recent book is Hematologies: The political life of blood in India (co-authored with Dwaipayan Banerjee, Open Access). His recent edited books include Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism’ (2022), Gurus and Media: Sound, Image, Machine, Text and the Digital (2023) and An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond (2023) (all co-edited). Recent (co-authored) journal articles include ‘Dons réels et potentiels : critique et relations de don fantômes’ (Revue du Mauss, 2004) and ‘Science as other than itself: Strategic anti-essentialism and keeping-while-disposing among Indian rationalists’ (SAMAJ, 2024).
Rachel Hale (Cardiff University)
Dr. Rachel Hale is a Research Associate in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. Her background is in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies. Her research includes: the NIHR funded study Social, economic and ethical issues around cultured red blood cells, stem cells and immortalised cell lines, which she worked on with Prof. Julie Kent at the University of the West of England and with BrisSynBio (a BBSRC / EPSRC funded Synthetic Biology Research Centre at the University of Bristol); and, the Wellcome Trust funded study Pre-conception genetic screening for autosomal recessive conditions of uncertain or highly variable prognosis: social and ethical implications, which she worked on with Prof. Felicity Boardman at the University of Warwick. Both studies involved research participants who have blood conditions.
Morteza Hashemi (University of Nottingham)
Dr. Morteza Hashemi is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Nottingham. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick in 2016. Prior to his current role, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh from 2017 to 2020. Dr. Hashemi’s research interests are diverse, encompassing medical sociology, ethnicity and identity , sociology of religion and activism and sociology of science and technology. He is particularly interested in social circulation of blood in the UK and grassroots blood donation campaigns of ethno-religious minorities. Since September 2023, he has been the Director of the Identities, Citizenship, Equalities and Migration Centre (ICEMiC) at the School of Sociology and Social Policy of the University of Nottingham.
Marie-Andrée Jacob (University of Leeds)
Marie-Andrée Jacob is Professor of Law in the School of Law and Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds. She is interested in the ways law and regulation manage differences and create consensus in various healthcare settings. She is the author of Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants (Penn, 2012) and co-editor (with Anna Kirkland) of the Research Handbook on Sociolegal Studies of Medicine and Health (Edward Elgar 2020). Recent papers include: ‘How to prove her wrong: hierarchies of watching in the case of the fasting girl Sarah Jacob’ (Medical Humanities 2024) and ‘The Changing Natures of the Medical Register: Doctors, Precarity, and Crisis’ (with Priyasha Saksena, Social and Legal Studies 2023). She is leading the AHRC grant Making it to the Registers: documenting migrant carers’ experiences of registration and fitness to practise (makingregisters.leeds.ac.uk) and co-leads the AHRC Research Network The Choreography of Consent: Experiments in dance/law research.
Jieun Kim (University of Leeds)
Dr Jieun Kim is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. As a sociocultural and medical anthropologist, she is interested in scrutinizing the ways in which social inequalities are naturalised and contested based on perceptions of social and bodily differences. Her current research, funded by the Wellcome Trust (2021–23) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2023–25), focuses on the politics and symbolism of blood in blood donation in Japan and South Korea. Through ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and social media analysis, she examines how the practice of blood donation reshapes ideas of social belonging and identity in two countries where mono-ethnic nationhood remains a powerful ideal. This project also involves collaborative work with external partners, including the Thackray Museum of Medicine in the UK and the Korea Leukemia Patients’ Organization. Prior to this, she conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a former day labourers’ district (yoseba) in Yokohama, Japan. There, she examined how local activists, the homeless, and residents have worked to remake the area as a site of struggle for the ‘right to survival’. Bringing together critical studies of the body, care and citizenship, Dr Kim’s research has been published in journals across anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, New Genetics and Society, and Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.
Samin Rashidbeigi (Rice University)
Samin Rashidbeigi is a historian of the human body and the technologies that regulate this body’s livelihood, transformation, and termination in the modern Middle East.
Her current book-length project, tentatively titled Before the Puncture, is a social history of blood transfusion in Iran. She uses archival documents and oral histories conducted in Iran to examine the transition from the commodification of blood in a blood market sustained by the urban poor to the construction of altruistic blood donors. She asks what the possibility of moving blood from one body to another has to do with the meaning of citizenship, and what social institutions and historical processes needed to be in place for ordinary women and men to give strangers some of their blood. Samin is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral fellow in the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice University, participating in the project “Reimagining Technologies of Care: Racial Health Equity and Data Justice.”
Amadou Senou (University of Santiago de Compostela)
Amadou Senou teaches anthropology in the Faculty of History and Geography at the University of Social Sciences and Management in Bamako, Mali. He is also a doctoral student at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain under the supervision of Dr Jacob Copeman. Senou works on blood donation within religious organisations in Mali. In particular, he focuses on the Ançardine association, a religious movement with over 3 million members led by Seid Cherif Ousmane Madani HAIDARA, a highly influential religious figure who encourages his followers to donate blood regularly in order to save lives. Senou’s sresearch highlights the role of Mali’s current religious movements in blood donation policy in a country shaken by a security crisis.
Toyah Van der Poten (Ghent University)
Toyah Van der Poten is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at Ghent University. She has a specific interest in decolonial theory, intersectionality, and topics related to migration, diversity, and exclusion. Toyah is also a member of CESSMIR (the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees), an interdisciplinary consortium at Ghent University focused on achieving societal impact. With a background as a filmmaker, experienced in both documentaries and socially engaged artistic projects, her doctoral research critically examines the underrepresentation of ‘minorities’ in blood donation, focusing on the organizational field of blood procurement. This comparative study explores blood donation systems in Belgium and the United Kingdom, highlighting the experiences of individuals with a migration background. Toyah is planning her fieldwork in the UK in spring 2025, which will include focus groups, ethnography, and interviews with culturally diverse communities to examine in-and exclusion in blood donation. Fieldwork will be conducted in both Ghent (Belgium) and Leicester (United Kingdom).
Past Newsletters
Hematopolitics Newsletter, Issue 1