Carla Rodrigues is a social scientist with a background in sociology of health and medical anthropology, interested in how people care for their health and well-being in everyday life, and how situated practices, experiences, desires and needs around health, care, and the body are shaped by wider social, economic, historical and political processes.

Since 2006, Carla has worked with multiple research teams and non-academic stakeholders on a range of social science and interdisciplinary research and intervention projects – particularly on medicines, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and, more recently, microbiome research. She has conducted research on a variety of topics, including the prevention and management of infection diseases (such as malaria and diarrheal diseases); pharmaceutical use, dispensing and prescription practices; self-care and therapeutic trajectories; and healthcare and regulatory interventions. Across these areas, she has explored social processes and interactions related to health, risk, uncertainty, trust and knowledge construction.

For her PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (Anthropology Department), Carla conducted community-based research in Maputo, Mozambique, where she studied the social embeddedness of everyday medicine use – including antibiotics and other antimicrobials – with a particular focus on processes of pharmaceuticalisation and trust.

Carla has contributed to several academic initiatives and has served on scientific committees and advisory boards aimed at studying and addressing antibiotic use, the social dimensions of AMR and interdisciplinary microbiome research. She is also a board member of the Social Science and Global Health Centre at the University of Amsterdam.

She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Dutch NWO-funded research consortium MetaHealth, which explores microbial, sociocultural and care contexts in early life. She is also a Co-Principal Investigator on a collaborative, seed-funded project on antibiotic use and rotavirus vaccine-trial effects in Ghana, and a researcher in a scoping study for implementation research on self-care interventions and sexual and reproductive health and rights in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Morocco and Zambia.

In September 2018, Carla presented her work titled “Self-medication with antibiotics in Maputo: practices, rationales and social relations” at the Social Science and AMR Research symposium hosted by the AMIS programme, which was later published in the special issue Anti-biosis – social and cultural inquiries into human-microbe relations. Further information on Carla is available here.

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