Aslihan Sanal, PhD
Dr. Sanal completed her doctoral degree in history, anthropology, science, technology and society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a medical anthropologist, she conducted research on organ trafficking and transplants in Turkey with a particular focus on political economy, corruption, social justice, the body, and the state. Her first book, New Organs Within Us (Duke 2011) is on transplants, death and dying in a time of political transformation in post-Cold War Turkey, and its connections to Europe and to the Middle East. Dr. Sanal uses personal conversations and regular interviews as a tool to follow the transformations in scientists’ inner lives over years.
In 2012, Dr. Sanal began research as an anthropologist in residence at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, where she pursued development of psychoanalytically informed methodologies to study scientists. This phenomenology-based approach fuses methods inspired by sociological qualitative methods and psychoanalysis to explore how science is experienced as an inner universe filled with evolving emotional-mental objects. It explores our human potential instrumentalized by scientists.
Sanal A. "Robin Hood" of techno-Turkey or organ trafficking in the state of ethical beings. Cult Med Psychiatry. 2004 Sep; 28(3):281-309. PMID: 15600114.