Medical Anthropology, Gender, Kinship, Reproduction

Vietnam

Anna Salakova holds a Bachelor’s degree in European Studies from Maastricht University and a Master’s degree in Humanities and Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Her Master’s thesis explored how official gendered discourses and policies in post-reform Vietnam shape women’s daily lives, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi. Anna is currently a doctoral researcher in the URPP Human Reproduction Reloaded | H2R project, SP 3: Ethnography of Human Reproduction and Single Case, supervised by Prof. Dr. Annuska Derks and Prof. Dr. Tine Gammeltoft. Her PhD project will examine altruistic gestational surrogacy in Vietnam, where the practice is legally restricted to family members. Through ethnographic fieldwork, she will analyze the decision-making processes involved in surrogacy, the experiences of participants, and how the practice redefines kinship ties, shedding light on the moral economies and power dynamics at play in familial acts of care and exchange.