Sofia Bowen Silva

Sofía’s research interests include psychiatry, culture and mental health; social security, labour and political economy of health; state power, citizenship and political transformations; science and technologies studies and cultures of expertise.

Her PhD research project, funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), explores the intersection between work relations, psychiatry and citizenship. Through long-term ethnography in Santiago of Chile, Sofia studied workers and experts’ experience with occupational health and psychiatric sick leave.  In a time of political uprising in Chile, Sofia analyses how politics of health insurance and negotiations over the accountability of psychiatric diseases interplay with the emergence of claims for social justice and political change of historical forms of oppression within the workplace and beyond.

Sofía holds a BSc in Social Anthropology at the University of Chile and an MSc in Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. During 2017, she worked as a research assistant in the project ‘Mental Health, Migration and the Megacity (São Paulo)’ with Prof Nikolas Rose (King’s College London). Currently, Sofía participates in the ‘Culture, Power and Medicine’ and the ‘Mental Health and Society’ research groups and is affiliated to the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health (King’s College London).

In addition to her research tasks at GHSM, Sofia is a board member of the Platform for Social Research on Mental Health in Latin America (PLASMA). She has also been awarded an ESRC/AHRC mobility fund to collaborate with academics in Japan and Europe in the project ‘Biomedicine and Beyond: The Social and Regulatory Dimensions of Therapeutics in Japan and the UK’.