As the world becomes increasingly interconnected through travel, communication, and information, interdisciplinary approaches to address global and reproductive health issues are crucial. And as the politics of reproductive healthcare are shifting in uneven ways across the globe, the need for deep understanding of local contexts within a globalized world is ever more vital. Our recently published, co-edited Wiley Blackwell handbook, A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology provides a sweeping overview of studies of reproduction from an anthropologically informed lens with a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of medical anthropology, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), global and public health, and critical analyses of both gender and sexuality and of  race and ethnicity.

Under the narrow shade of our umbrellas, a community health worker from a local NGO and I walked along a dirt path to the edge of some paddy fields in a village in Tamil Nadu, South India in the summer of 2015. There we met a group of Dalit (oppressed-caste) women who were squeezed together under a clump of trees on a small strip of raised land between two fields.

The summer of 2015 was one of the hottest on record in South India at that time, with temperatures consistently above 40ºC (104ºF) every day. Rains which should have begun to arrive had not come by mid-July. These women were hoping to be called for daily agricultural wage labor in the fields, and they had taken refuge under the shade while they waited. They had been waiting all morning with no work available; it had been the same for several days because there was a drought and the crops were failing.