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Imagining HIV/AIDS: morality and perceptions of personal risk in Nigeria
The disparity between people’s knowledge about HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they take measures to protect themselves is one of the most vexing issues for public health workers and social science analysts. This paper aims to explain some of…
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…
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
Youth, sin and sex in Nigeria: Christianity and HIV/AIDS-related beliefs and behaviour among rural-urban migrants
In Nigeria, popular understandings of HIV/AIDS and individual risk assessment and behaviour unfold within an interpretative grid that draws on a religious moral framework. This paper reports results from a two‐year study of HIV/AIDS‐related beliefs and behaviour among adolescent and…
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
“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.
Journal Article
‘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…
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…
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
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…
Journal Article
Traditional healers in Nigeria: perception of cause, treatment and referral practices for severe malaria.
Malaria remains one of the main causes of mortality among young children in sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria traditional healers play an important role in health care delivery and the majority of the population depend on them for most of their…
