Dr Eleanor Hutchinson
BA MA PhD
Associate Professor
in Anthropology and Public Health
LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom
I trained as a Development Anthropologist with Sandra Wallman at University College London and then worked at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) with Shahra Razavi in the Gender and Development Team on a pioneering project on the care economy. I joined LSHTM in 2008.
Affiliations
Teaching
I'm the module organiser for Medical Anthropology in Public Health (DL) and have overseen critical developments in the course. I deliver the lecture "People Centred Health Systems" on the in house Health Systems Course and the lecture on International Development and Global Health.
Research
My research focuses primarily on informality in health systems. This includes examining how social and political networks shape everyday practice and experience in health systems and the unintended consequences of policy change and public health interventions. I draw on social science theory and political economy to do this.
I have two main arenas in which I work. The first is in the medicines retail sector, where I have traced how ways of distributing medicines in these highly informal spaces are shaped by socio-economic and political networks, policy changes, public health interventions and social relations. The second is in the formal health system where I have looked at how health workers incorporate change into daily practice and care giving; and more recently how corruption shapes the delivery of care and is shaped by social networks and political systems within and beyond the health system. My research has been funded by MRC, DFID and Wellcome.