Zara Bakshi is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Rice University, working at the intersection of medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and the anthropology of infrastructure. Her research examines the ambivalent politics of care under conditions of institutional attrition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kashmir, her dissertation follows care as it moves between psychiatric clinics, addiction economies, households, and humanitarian programs.

Rather than treat care as a self-evident good, she asks how recovery comes to be defined, measured, and moralized; how clinical categories travel between medical, religious, and everyday registers; and how the labor of attendant kin, most often women, holds together what clinical institutions on their own cannot. Reading therapeutic settings as infrastructures, she attends to the slow work of waiting, maintenance, and repair through which institutions shape moral and affective life.

Bakshi holds degrees in psychology (University of Delhi; Ashoka University) and in medical humanities (University of London), where her thesis examined how Kashmiri women articulate loss, endurance, and selfhood. Before coming to Rice she worked as a human rights researcher. That background shapes both how she reads clinical and humanitarian institutions and how she approaches the politics of knowledge production.