Care, Reproduction, Childbirth, Affect, Morality, Medical Anthropology, Gender, Kinship, Globalisation.

Indonesia, India, South Africa

Molly Fitzpatrick is a medical and political anthropologist interested in issues of care, gender, affect, and morality. Through ethnographic explorations of narratives and practices of resistance, autonomy, and self-determination in different contexts, she aims to shed light on the multiple ways in which people question the authority of the state as well as medical and scientific authority when it comes to ideas about the body, gender, and kinship. Through her research, she aims to contribute to key debates within the anthropology of reproduction, the anthropology of morality and ethics, the anthropology of care, the anthropology of social movements, feminist theory, and gender studies.

After doing a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology and a Research master’s in social sciences at the University of Amsterdam, Molly Fitzpatrick completed her PhD at the University of Zurich in 2022. Her PhD research on an alternative birth movement in Bali, Indonesia, critically examined care as a moral practice and looked at how ideas of the natural are shaped and made politically and morally significant in the context of two natural birth clinics. In 2023, her PhD dissertation was awarded the Jahrespreis by the philosophical faculty of the University of Zurich. She currently holds a position as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the chair on ‘Social Transformation Processes’, led by Prof. Dr. Annuska Derks.

She is interested in supervising Ba and MA theses in the fields of medical anthropology; reproduction; care; morality and ethics; affect; globalisation, development, and mobility; social movements; gender and sexuality; kinship; sensory ethnography.

Publikationen