About the author

Shajeela Shawkat is a medical anthropologist and PhD candidate at Leiden University, where she is part of the European Research Council funded project Globalizing Palliative Care. Her doctoral research focuses on the care trajectories of people living with spinal cord injuries in Bangalore, India. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork including interviews, rehab visits, and collaborative art workshops her work explores how personhood, care, sex, intimacy, and future making are negotiated in the everyday. She writes about the collaborative and relational dimensions of this fieldwork in this blog post.​

We Drew Ourselves, a graphic novel grounded in this research, brings together intimate moments, dry humour, bodily routines, and the unspoken textures of care. The project aims to bridge academic insight and lived experience, translating anthropological research into accessible visual storytelling.

Before her PhD, Shawkat received her MSc in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology from Leiden University. Her thesis explored diversity in computer science in a tertiary education institute in the Netherlands. She holds a BSS in Anthropology from BRAC University in Dhaka, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on the construction of Hijra identity among sex workers. In Bangladesh, she also worked in nonprofit and educational spaces designing school programs and leading youth leadership workshops.