Dr Magdalena Zegarra-Chiappori
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About
My name is Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori and I am a British Academy International Fellow in the department of Anthropology. I am a Peruvian Medical Anthropologist who holds a BA in Hispanic Literature from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, a Master in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a Master and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, USA. My research interests lie at the intersection of economies of care, old age, intimacy and affect theory, social abandonment, death, marginalized communities, and Latin American studies.
Research
Throughout my work, I seek to examine the lives and subjective experiences of one of the most invisible, unmapped, and understudied populations of Peruvian society: urban older people in Peru’s capital, Lima. As in the Global North, in the Global South population aging is poised to become one of the most significant social transformations of the twenty-first century, one the world’s most pressing challenges of our times. COVID-19 showed us that the inequities of neoliberal globalism produce a differential distribution of social risk that renders vulnerable those who are aging without family support and financial security. This is a reality, especially in countries with disrupted and poor medical infrastructures like Peru. In Peru, people are living longer than they had, but under more precarious conditions. Weak public policies, deficient distribution of national budgets, institutional corruption, and broken state institutions threaten the provision of adequate care to older adults. As a result, many people in the region are aging amidst conditions of loneliness, poverty, and social destitution. Interweaving Latin American studies, population aging, and medical anthropology, I focus on a topic of global magnitude in a region of the world where research on the matter is scant and rather urgent.
Grounded in thirty months of rigorous ethnographic fieldwork at dilapidated long-term care institutions for older adults in Lima, my book-in-preparation, Growing Old in the Margins, demonstrates that people above 60, who lack family connections and economic means to support themselves, once in these facilities, are often dehumanized by the precarious care they are provided with from staff due to personnel shortage, budget cuts and lack of resources. As an ethnographer of marginalized communities, I take decrepit long-term care facilities in Peru as an opportunity to consider how citizenship and human rights, for many older adults, are at risk today. These places often offer unreliable and neglectful care that trespasses residents’ bodies and emotional selves. My fieldwork at these institutions focuses on exploring the bioethical threats older adults must face when both their families and the Peruvian state have turned their backs on them.