• Assistant professor, African and African American Studies
• Assistant professor, Anthropology
• Assistant professor, Women and Gender Studies
• Assistant professor,
• Assistant professor, International and Area Studies

• Ph.D. at Yale University
• B.A. at University of Virginia

Parikh offers the following description of her research interests:

(source: downloaded from her Web page 10/03)

My research focuses on the intersection of local transformations; global processes; and structures of inequalities surrounding issues of sexuality, particularly gender, sexual and reproductive health, regulation, courtship and romance, and marriage. Using ethnographic and historical methods and critical theory, my research in eastern Uganda focuses on how regimes of regulation and discourses of sexuality have shifted since independence and, more recently, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Theoretical questions revolve around how differentiated actors appropriate increasingly accessible, yet often contradictory, images and discourses of sexuality into their everyday debates, conversations, and ideas of sexual relationships. I highlight the ways in which various state, family, health, and local agents attempt to regulate meanings of sexuality and how such struggles are connected to increased anxiety stimulated by sexual health concerns, commercialization of the local economy, and Uganda's connection to global cultural flows. My current work examines youth romance as written in their love letters, and attempts to regulate sexuality through the age of consent law. I pay particular attention to the articulations of historic inequalities such as sex, age, and class in sexual relationships.

In my fieldwork I integrate ethnographic research methods with active research techniques. By doing so, I enter into dialogue with debates about the role of anthropology in public health and anthropological critiques of development. I have begun further research on infidelity and HIV transmission and the social history of sexuality in rural post-colonial Uganda. Broadly speaking, I am interested in sexual and reproductive health issues, and regimes of sexuality.

My courses cross into African and Afro-American Studies, Women's Studies, International and Area Studies, Social Thought and Analysis, and the History and Philosophy of Science.

Selected Publications:

n.d. Bifurcating Risk and Pleasure: The Commercialization and Medicalization of Sexuality. In The Moral Object of Sex: Science, Development, and Sexuality in Global Perspective. V. Adams and S. Pigg (eds). Durham: University Press.

2001. Regulating Romance: The Poetics and Politics of Youth Sexuality in Uganda. Conference Proceedings for Gender, Sexuality, and AIDS in Africa. University of Copenhagen, Institute of Public Health, Department of Gender and Medicine.

Washington University in St. Louis	School of Medicine
News & Information	Medical News