Maryani Palupy Rasidjan, PhD

Maryani Palupy Rasidjan is a postdoctoral fellow at ANSIRH. Her doctoral research investigates family planning structures in West Papua, Indonesia, the site of contested political sovereignty and military occupation, at the intersection of racialization and Indigeneity. Her work is animated by questions of postcoloniality, racialization, biopower and justice. In her postdoctoral research, she hopes to bring questions of power, race and representation to bear on the expansion of Community Health Worker (CHW) programs in family planning health care delivery in the Bay Area, CA. In what ways is CHW expertise valued or contested? What tensions, challenges, or openings might arise from the expansion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to include and standardize CHW labor? By centering Black Feminist Health Science Studies, she is interested in investigating the ways in which family planning CHWs conceive of and deliver care and the impact of this relationship on the BIPOC women seeking these services. Dr. Rasidjan is a proud first-generation student, who also teaches in UCSF’s Global Health Sciences Masters Program on health equity and justice. She received her PhD from the University of California, San Francisco-Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology.