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“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,…
Vaccine anxieties, vaccine preparedness: Perspectives from Africa in a Covid-19 era
Global debates about vaccines as a key element of pandemic response and future preparedness in the era of Covid-19 currently focus on questions of supply, with attention to global injustice in vaccine distribution and African countries as rightful beneficiaries of…
Research paper
Youths’ violent resistance of necropolitical landscape of COVID-19 in Nigeria’s vanishing foodscapes and waterscapes
This article interrogates the necropolitical landscape of COVID-19 in Nigeria. The article explores how the landscape emerges at the intersection of COVID-19 regime and structural violence and materializes in foodscapes and waterscapes of the country. These changes ultimately impose the…
Research paper
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 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
“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.
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 I Have Not Taken the COVID-19 Vaccine” a Descriptive Qualitative Study of Older Adults’ Perceived Views of COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake in Nigeria
Globally, the COVID-19 vaccine uptake is increasing, but slowly among older adults residing in lower and middle-income countries, including Nigeria. Following this, we explored the perceived views of older adults on the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in Nigeria. Findings…
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
West African Migration in the Age of Climate Change : Translocal Perspectives on Mobility from Mali and Senegal
This thesis contributes to the debate on climate change, environment, and migration by scrutinizing conceptual and methodological deficiencies and adopting a migration research perspective. The author uses a multi-sited ethnography in Mali and Senegal to show how human activites shape…
Research paper
“We are the heroes because we are ready to die for this country”: Participants’ decision-making and grounded ethics in an Ebola vaccine clinical trial
This paper reports findings from social science research carried out in Kambia, Northern Sierra Leone during first year of an Ebola vaccine trial (August 2015–July 2016). The study used a range of qualitative methods to explore participant motivations for volunteering…
Research paper
Violence and the body: somatic expressions of trauma and vulnerability during war
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted along the Sierra Leone-Guinea border during wartime, this article explores the contested nature of the body and bodily illness during times of spectacular political violence.
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 the ‘bushmeat ban’ in West Africa during the 2013-2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic.
Following the 2013-2016 outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa, governments across the region imposed a ban on the hunting and consumption of meat from wild animals. This injunction was accompanied by public health messages emphasising the infectious…
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
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…
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 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.
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
Taking chances, making choices: the tactical dimensions of “reproductive strategies” in southwestern Nigeria
Reproductive outcomes may be less a result of consciously pursued “reproductive strategies” than of other choices, and are subject to the influence not only of other individuals, but also of caprice and circumstance. Drawing on ethnographic research in southwestern Nigeria,…
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
Structural drivers of vulnerability to zoonotic disease in Africa
This paper analyses three case studies—trypanosomiasis in Zimbabwe, Ebola and Lassa fever in Sierra Leone and Rift Valley fever in Kenya — to argue that addressing the underlying structural drivers of disease vulnerability is essential for a ‘One Health’ approach…
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…
