Dr Wesam Hassan

Dr Wesam Hassan is an anthropologist and medical doctor whose work lies at the intersection of medical and economic anthropology. She is currently an LSE Fellow in Anthropology and a Postdoctoral Affiliate at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research explored how people navigate uncertainty, risk, temporality, and speculation in times of economic and moral crisis. Wesam completed her DPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey on gambling, cryptocurrency trading, and state-regulated games of chance. Her work traced how speculative practices, whether in lotteries or digital markets, mediate moral economies, class formation, and political imagination under conditions of economic volatility. She also holds an MA in Anthropology from the American University in Cairo, where she examined biomedical uncertainty and the governance of HIV-positive subjectivities in Egypt.

Before returning to academia, Wesam worked for over a decade in the public health and humanitarian sectors, leading research and interventions for United Nations agencies, Johns Hopkins University, and international NGOs across the Middle East and North Africa.

Her interdisciplinary background as both physician and anthropologist shapes her ongoing engagement with health, economy, and technology as entangled social domains that impact people's wellbeing and welfare.Expertise

Expertise

Economic Anthropology; Medical Anthropology; Gambling and Speculation; Anthropology of Time; AI and Healthcare; Biopolitics and Global Health; Moral Economies; Gender and Reproduction; Material and Digital Cultures; Turkey; Egypt

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6863-1624

Wesam’s research sits at the crossroads of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS). Her work is driven by questions of how individuals, institutions, and infrastructures manage uncertainty and risk amid economic and technological transformation. Her doctoral research in Istanbul explored the moral economies of gambling and speculation in moments of financial crisis, analysing the entangled ethics of luck, risk, and aspiration. This work forms the basis of her forthcoming book manuscript . Her current project, funded by the LSE Research Infrastructure and Innovation Fund (RIIF), investigates artificial intelligence in healthcare and medical education. It examines how AI technologies, from algorithmic diagnostics to machine-assisted training, are reshaping professional authority, moral responsibility, and futures of care. Through ethnographic and comparative research in different field sites, the project traces how technological affordances are reorganising medical expertise and governance, foregrounding questions of ethics, trust, and accountability.

Across her research portfolio, Wesam engages with themes of speculation, futurity and temporality, moral economy, uncertainty, and the anthropology of expertise, contributing to wider conversations about value, care, and technological futures.

At the London School of Economics, Wesam convenes and teaches in Economic Anthropology, integrating active and inclusive learning methods such as debates, Mentimeter polls, and student-led discussions. Her teaching connects classical theory with contemporary problems of speculation, value, uncertainty, and topics in economic anthropology. At the University of Oxford, she has taught across the Social Sciences Division, including courses in:

• Economic Anthropology
• Addiction and the Humanities
• Medical Anthropology
• Critical Development Geographies
• Ethnographic Writing and Methodology

As an Ashmolean Teaching Fellow (2022–23), she developed object-based learning modules in collaboration with the Krasis Programme, using museum collections to teach material, visual, and digital cultures of value, health, and exchange. Her pedagogy draws on fieldwork from Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and the UK, encouraging students to connect ethnographic detail to global social and economic processes.

Wesam is committed to public-facing and collaborative anthropology. Her research has informed policy discussions on gambling harms, AI ethics, future thinking, and health governance, and she is co-developing a UKRI-funded Rapid Evidence Review on cryptocurrency and the normalisation of gambling with Dr Anthony Pickles (University of Birmingham) (Currently under consideration). At the London School of Economics, Wesam was awarded an Education for Sustainability grant by the Eden Centre to design and lead a student-centred initiative on rethinking sustainability from anthropological and decolonial perspectives. The project engages students in research and reflective practice around the question “What is Sustainability?”, encouraging them to interrogate the moral and economic dimensions of sustainable futures. Building on this work, she is convening an upcoming workshop with the students on Sustainability organised by Eden center, bringing together students and faculty to share pedagogical innovations and cross-disciplinary dialogue on sustainability, ethics, and social justice. She contributes to public lectures and invited seminars . Selected events: recent seminar with University of Birmingham, interdisciplinary workshops, and museum programmes, and her work has been featured in events at the University of Amsterdam, Podcast by Royal Anthropological Institute, and Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Her broader engagement focuses on bridging academic research, applied social sciences, wellbeing in health and economy, and community outreach and involvement to advance critical dialogues on how technologies of speculation and diagnosis shape moral and material futures.