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Report
A review of the social and behavioural science research landscape for mpox in African settings
This report maps and synthesises social and behavioural science studies on mpox in sub-Saharan Africa from 2017 until December 2025.
Background report
Epidemic preparedness and response in Senegal fr
This report summarises a roundtable discussion which aimed to share strategic information from social science research, help actors in epidemic preparedness and response put in place targeted and appropriate interventions, and highlight the roles social science researchers can play in…
Briefing
SSHAP West Africa Hub: Health emergency cycles and social context in West Africa fr
This landscape paper summarises the contextual factors that shape health emergencies and responses to health emergencies in the West Africa region, drawing on examples from Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone.
Discriminate biopower and everyday biopolitics: views on sickle cell testing in Dakar
Many physicians in Senegal and France, where most Senegalese sickle cell specialists are partially trained, assume that genetic testing that could imply selective abortion for people with sickle cell would run counter to the religious and cultural ethics of people…
“Right tool,” wrong “job”: Manual vacuum aspiration, post-abortion care and transnational population politics in Senega
The “rightness” of a technology for completing a particular task is negotiated by medical professionals, patients, state institutions, manufacturing companies, and non-governmental organizations. This paper shows how certain technologies may challenge the meaning of the “job” they are designed to…
Background report
Your Pocket Is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal
In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic…
Research paper
Xenophobia’s Contours During an Ebola Epidemic: Proximity and the Targeting of Peul Migrants in Senegal
This article examines the effect of geographical proximity on targeting patterns during Ebola-era xenophobic outbursts by Senegalese against a migrant Peul population of Guinean origins. It highlights the limited extent to which epidemics shape the micro-dynamics of outbreaks of xenophobia…
Background report
Women,Peace and Casamance – A field study of how women organisations in Casamance, Senegal are working for peace
Drawing on feminist critical theory, this ethnographic study in Casamance examined how gender roles affect women and women organisations strive for peace. The research shows how embedded gender roles in the Senegalese society and the patriarchal system dominate, making it…
Research paper
Without Rain or Land, Where Will Our People Go? Climate Change, Land Grabbing, and Human Mobility: Insights from Senegal and Cambodia
Based on a multi-case and multi-sited qualitative study in both Senegal and Cambodia, involving more than 150 participants in semi-structured interviews and focus groups affected by four different agribusiness projects, this paper shows how these three major contemporary challenges are…
Research paper
‘With the kanyaleng and the help of god, you don’t feel ashamed’: women experiencing infertility in Casamance, Senegal
While the precarious situation of women with infertility in Sub-Saharan Africa is well documented, little is known about the ways in which such women show agency despite the challenges that infertility brings to their lives. This study provided a holistic…
Research paper
Why didn’t you write this in your diary? Or how nurses (mis)used clinic diaries to (re)claim shared reflexive spaces in Senegal
At the intersection between writings and silences, this paper explores the role played by the clinic diaries to mediate ethnographic encounters, and the iterative nature of ‘doing fieldwork’ to produce knowledge in hierarchical health systems. This paper also reflects on…
Research paper
‘When Migrants Become Messengers’: Affective Borderwork and Aspiration Management in Senegal
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork to explore how affect and emotions are used in migration awareness campaigns and how local communities respond. ‘Aspiration management’ works to instil a sense in would-be Senegalese migrants that their hopes of migration to…
Research paper
What post-abortion care indicators don’t measure: Global abortion politics and obstetric practice in Senegal
This article draws on an ethnography of Senegal’s post-abortion care (PAC) program, conducted between 2010 and 2011, to illustrate how PAC indicators obscure the professional and technological complexities of treating abortion complications in contexts where abortion is illegal. The author…
Research paper
Vaccine anxieties, vaccine preparedness: Perspectives from Africa in a Covid-19 era
This study used a ‘vaccine anxieties’ framework to consider the socially-embedded reasons why people want or do not want Covid-19 vaccines, and how this intersects with the dynamics of vaccine supply, access and distribution in rapidly-unfolding epidemic situations. Whereas discourses…
Research paper
Unintended consequences of implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions for the COVID-19 response in Africa: experiences from DRC, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda
The coronavirus (COVID 19) pandemic is one of the most terrifying disasters of the 21st century. The non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented to control the spread of the disease had numerous positive consequences. However, there were also unintended consequences—positively or negatively…
Research paper
Understanding Women’s Needs for Weather and Climate Information in Agrarian Settings: The Case of Ngetou Maleck, Senegal
This paper demonstrates that even at the village level, women have different climate and weather information needs, and differing abilities to act on that information. Preconceived connections between identities and vulnerability hinder the ability to address the climate-related development and…
Research paper
Treatment success or failure in children and adolescents born with HIV in rural Senegal: An anthropological perspective
The article presents the results of an anthropological study that aims to examine the modalities of medical and social care for CALHIV, identify the various structural and social determinants of treatment failure or success, and ascertain their respective influence. The…
Research paper
The symbolic violence of ‘outbreak’: A mixed methods, quasi-experimental impact evaluation of social protection on Ebola survivor wellbeing
Despite over 28,000 reported cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in the 2013-16 outbreak in West Africa, we are only beginning to trace the complex biosocial processes that have promoted its spread. Important questions remain, including the effects on survivors…
Research paper
‘The Suffering is Too Great’: Urban Internally Displaced Persons in the Casamance Conflict, Senegal
The paper addresses the dearth of studies of displaced people living in urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa through a survey of a particular group of internally displaced persons (IDPs) created by Senegal’s Casamance conflict. Analysis of survey data shows how…
Research paper
The politics of risk policies in Dakar, Senegal
The paper presents research on the flood mitigation strategies of urban dwellers and the State in the same locality in the suburbs of Dakar. Through an Actor Network Theory approach based on a “translocal” ethnography of risk, the paper explores…
Research paper
The perceived effects of COVID-19 pandemic on female genital mutilation/cutting and child or forced marriages in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Senegal
The effects of COVID-19 on harmful traditional practices such Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) and Child or Forced Marriages (CFM) have not been well documented. We examined how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected FGM/C and CFM in Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and…
Research paper
The anticipatory politics of dispossession in a Senegalese mining negotiation
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this article examines the contentious politics around a proposed mine, arguing that experiences of and resistances to dispossession are mediated by the folding together of temporal frames and diverse displacements. In particular, it…
Research paper
The anti-politics of health reform: household power relations and child health in rural Senegal
This article employs ethnographic evidence from rural Senegal to explore two dimensions of health sector reform. First, it makes the case that health reforms intersect with and exacerbate existing social, political, and economic inequalities. Second, the article explores how liberal…
Research paper
The Allure of Scapegoating Return Migrants during a Pandemic
The stigmatization of Senegalese return migrants as COVID-19 vectors by fellow Senegalese during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic troubles the self/other distinction that underpins the scholarly focus on epidemics and xenophobia and encourages the broader task of exploring…
Research paper
Subversive Epidemiology in Abortion Care: Reproductive Governance from the Global to the Local in Argentina and Senegal
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina and Senegal, this paper explores how health workers have adapted the global postabortion care model in ways that simultaneously challenge and reinforce national prohibitions on abortion. Although the global postabortion care model aimed to…
Research paper
Social learning, influence, and ethnomedicine: Individual, neighborhood and social network influences on attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model in rural Senegal
In this paper, the authors examine the association between individual, neighborhood, and social network characteristics and the likelihood of attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model encompassing beliefs about etiology of disease, appropriate therapeutic and preventative measures, and more general beliefs…
Research paper
Social construction of climate change and adaptation strategies among Senegalese artisanal fishers: Between empirical knowledge, magico-religious practices and sciences
African Atlantic countries are among the most vulnerable to global climate change (CC). Artisanal fishers are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of environmental change on the fisheries on which their livelihoods depend. Although the authors found that most fishers accept…
Research paper
Right tool, wrong “job”: Manual vacuum aspiration, post-abortion care and transnational population politics in Senegal
The “rightness” of a technology for completing a particular task is negotiated by medical professionals, patients, state institutions, manufacturing companies, and non-governmental organizations. This paper shows how certain technologies may challenge the meaning of the “job” they are designed to…
Research paper
Rewriting abortion: deploying medical records in jurisdictional negotiation over a forbidden practice in Senegal
This study explores how medical providers deploy medical records in boundary work over the treatment of complications of spontaneous and induced abortion in Senegal, where induced abortion is prohibited under any circumstance.
Research paper
Revisiting Tropes of Environmental and Social Change in Casamance, Senegal
The chapter examines paddy rice cultivation in Casamance, southern Senegal, amid broader contemporary contestations about environmentally induced migration.
Research paper
Relational (im)mobilities: a case study of Senegalese coastal fishing populations
This article applies a climate mobilities lens to a qualitative case study of an urban Senegalese fishing community, characterised by its ‘micro-mobilities’ as much as by its international migration. The author argues that (im)mobilities are neither fixed nor all-encompassing but…
Research paper
Rebel Recruitment and Migration: Theory and Evidence From Southern Senegal
The authors investigate whether the threat of recruitment by rebel groups spurs domestic and international migration, showing that individuals who fit the recruitment profiles of rebel groups are more likely to leave and be sent away by their families. The…
Research paper
Reaching the end goal: Do interventions to improve climate information services lead to greater food security?
Through household surveys, focus group activities, and participant observation, this research investigates linkages between CIS, uptake of CSA practices, and household food security through investigation of four research sites, two in Senegal and two in Kenya. Through household surveys, focus…
Problems endure despite policies: Urban livelihoods after forced displacement
This chapter considers issues related to urban development-caused forced displacement and resettlement and the legal and policy approaches developed to address them to assess what difference national and international policies and guidelines have made to the outcomes of urban forced…
Private sector engagement in the COVID-19 response: experiences and lessons from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda
The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed health systems and precipitated coalitions between public and private sectors to address critical gaps in the response. We conducted a study to document the public and private sector partnerships and engagements to inform current and…
Political Economy Analysis of Forced Displacement in Casamance, Senegal
This report describes research on dynamics of displacement due to armed conflict in Casamance, Senegal. It finds that historical policies, inequality, marginalisation, weak governance and entrenched poverty have conspired to foster continued impoverishment and arrested development in displacement affected communities,…
