Diana Ibanez-Tirado

Diana is a social anthropologist with a wide range of regional and linguistic expertise, and an inter-disciplinary approach. She obtained a PhD and an MA in social anthropology from SOAS, University of London, a BA in International Relations (UNAM), and an MA in Middle East Studies with Arabic Language (El Colegio de Mexico), and diplomas in Russian Language and Culture from UNAM and the Pushkin State Russian Institute in Moscow.

Diana’s early research documented how people in southern Tajikistan experience time, and then she worked on theorising different forms of transnational mobility and migration in Asia. Based on fieldwork conducted in China, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and Tajikistan, her work with Russian and Persian speaking traders has been published in the journals Ethnography; Current Sociology; Central Asian Survey, History and Anthropology, and the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.

From her research on temporality, and then mobility and trade, Diana developed an interest in the journeys people embark upon when searching for healing, medical treatments, and management of ill health. Since 2023, she has been investigating the journeys that Britons follow to seek dental services in Turkey, a phenomenon related to the "crisis" of NHS dentistry in the UK.