Dr Aneel Brar

Postdoctoral Affiliate

Aneel Brar is an Environmental Fellow at Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) and a Postdoctoral Affiliate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. His current work sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, planetary health, mental health, and environmental change, with a particular focus on how climate change, extreme heat, social inequality, and gender shape experiences of health and suffering.

His research combines ethnography, global health, epidemiology, and implementation research, while increasingly incorporating visual ethnography, film, and narrative storytelling as ways of understanding and communicating lived experience. He is particularly interested in how environmental and social transformations become embodied, and in how ethnographic research can contribute to wider public conversations about health, climate change, and inequality.

Aneel is a contributor to the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on climate change and mental health, where his work has focused on resilience and community responses to environmental disruption. At Princeton, he is developing research on climate change, maternal and mental health, and social suffering in South Asia, particularly in the increasingly heat-exposed regions of northern India.

His doctoral research at Oxford was based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Rajasthan and examined perinatal mental health, gender, kinship, and community-based care. Central to this work was the concept of parāyā—a sense of not belonging—which he uses to examine how social relationships and gendered expectations shape women’s experiences of distress and care.

Aneel is also co-founder of the Mata Jai Kaur Maternal and Child Health Centre in Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan, where he has worked for more than fifteen years developing programmes in maternal health, community mental health, gender-based violence, and psychosocial care.

He holds a DPhil in Anthropology from Oxford, an MMSc in Global Health Delivery from Harvard University, and an MA in Political Science from McGill University.