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47 results found
Journal Article
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…
Journal Article
“You have to find a caring man, like your father!” Gendering sickle cell and refashioning women’s moral boundaries in Sierra Leone
This qualitative study undertaken in 2018, explores if and how sickle cell disorders become gendered in Sierra Leone through the analytical framework of a feminist ethics of care.
Men’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in Sierra Leone: Reexamining definitions of “male partner involvement”.
In recent decades, global health researchers and policy makers have advocated for men’s increased involvement in pregnancy and childbirth with the goal of improving maternal health outcomes. However, such approaches often fail to account for the culturally valid and gendered…
Caregiving in Crisis: Fatherhood Refashioned by Sierra Leone’s Ebola Epidemic
In much of the literature on Sierra Leone, young men have been recognized for perpetrating violence or resisting authority. This characterization extended into the Ebola crisis, as young men were depicted as “resisting” public health measures. In contrast, little scholarship…
Community health care workers in pursuit of TB: Discourses and dilemmas
Community-led tuberculosis (TB) active case finding is widely promoted, heavily funded, but many efforts fail to meet expectations. The underlying reasons why TB symptom screening programs underperform are poorly understood. This study examines Nigerian stakeholders’ insights to characterize the mechanisms,…
Journal Article
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…
Envisioning, Evaluating and Co-Enacting Performance in Global Health Interventions: Ethnographic Insights from Senegal
The notion of performance has become dominant in health programming, whether being embodied through pay-for-performance schemes or through other incentive-based interventions. In this article, we seek to unpack the idea of performance and performing in a dialogical fashion between field-based…
Metrics of Survival: Post-Abortion Care and Reproductive Rights in Senegal.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Senegal between 2010 and 2011, the author demonstrates how health professionals have deployed indicators such as number of women and abortion type treated in government hospitals to demonstrate commitment to global mandates on reproductive…
Journal Article
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…
Background Reports
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…
Journal Article
The Islamification of antiretroviral therapy: Reconciling HIV treatment and religion in northern Nigeria.
Access and adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) are essential to HIV treatment success and epidemic control. This article is about how HIV-positive Muslims and providers balance ART with religious tenets and obligations.
Journal Article
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…
