Abhishek Mohanty

Abhishek’s substantive experience is wide and multidisciplinary, spanning business management, industry, entrepreneurship, design research, and the social sciences. In the past he has worked as a Director in Management Consulting with PwC, and also co-founded LagomWorks, an interdisciplinary research and design company. His doctoral research is comparative and ethnographically studies health app futures in India and the UK. He has and continues to engage with digital health start-ups and the wider healthcare ecosystem in both countries. He has presented his research at industry and academic conferences. His papers have been published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals (SJPR, EPIC Proceedings), industry magazines, and digital libraries such as that of UNESCO. He has also taught modules at business schools in India and the UAE. He holds an AHRC CHASE DTP studentship for his doctoral studies, as well as small fieldwork grants from the Fürer-Haimendorf Fund as well as the SOAS Doctoral School. His earlier awards include the Chevening Scholarship.

Abhishek’s research interests lie at the anthropological intersections of design, digital cultures, healthcare, and entrepreneurship on the one hand, and India and the United Kingdom on the other hand. Before starting on his PhD, he has researched the design of patient awareness apps, telemedicine (or remote health), mask-wearing behaviour, as well as alternative value-making in start-ups and technology organisations. He brings in understandings of industry, business management, and the social sciences. He has presented at the EPIC Conferences (2020 and 2021), the RAI Film Festival (2021), as well as the ASA Conference (2021). His work on digital research methods has been included in the UNESCO digital library. He has been a reviewer for SJPR and also chaired a panel at the ASA Conference (2023).   For his doctoral research, he is anthropologically studying how the future of healthcare is imagined through, with, and as digital technology (or simply, digital). Anchoring his project in digital enabled healthcare (a health app in Chandigarh, and a health tech startup incubator in London), he is ethnographically studying its spaces of design/development and delivery. How do start-ups imagine the technology, and how do healthcare professionals negotiate it whilst using it to deliver healthcare? How are their imaginations shaped at the macro/etic and lived/emic levels? How does the Body/Other in this sense get imagined and coded into the algorithmic logic and data assemblages of digital health? His central anthropological question is: how and what might the sociality of a digital future be? By bringing in a comparative focus on Chandigarh and London, he hopes to present a pluralistic reading of health apps, as well as start-ups and digital more broadly, as one that factors in alternative ontologies at the intersection of health, digital, and future-making.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9854-1064