Jaya is Professor of International Health at the Curtin School of Population Health. Her research has been on refugee and migrant populations and vulnerable and priority groups. She discusses health inequity in the context of COVID, and the difficulties faced by those who have lost family members but have not been able to travel and go through the process of grieving.
Jaya, who was born in India and has lived in Africa, talks about the notion that there is a greater acceptance of death in both of those places, that it is more common to ‘grieve loudly’ and that communities come together in death. She describes the approach to death in Hindu culture, the HIV crisis that occurred while she was living in Uganda, and the Rwandan genocide. The interview concludes with Jaya sharing her views on voluntary assisted dying.