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Research paper
Responsibility, repair and care in Sierra Leone’s health system.
Central to the workings of a hospital are the technical and bureaucratic systems that ensure the effective coordination of information and biological materials of patients across time and space. In this paper, which is based on ethnographic research in a…
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
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
‘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
‘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…
Citizens, custodians, and villains: Environmentality and the politics of difference in Senegal’s community forests
This paper situates environmental subjectivities as a constituent part of the politics of identity, property, and authority, drawing on feminist theories of subjectivity and the framework of articulating identity. Through an ethnographic investigation of community forest management in central Senegal,…
Diagnosing Diabetes, Diagnosing Colonialism: An Ethnography of the Classification and Counting of a Senegalese Metabolic Disease
This article explores the top-down production of the statistics frequently circulated in global health. These data must first originate in a place like the public hospital in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in doctor’s offices and laboratories and medical archives.
Displacement in Casamance, Senegal: lessons (hopefully) learned, 2000–2019
The paper reflects on fieldwork conducted since 2000 with displaced communities in Lower and Middle Casamance, Senegal, amid West Africa’s arguably longest running civil conflict. While this is a small conflict in a geographically confined space, Casamance presents a microcosm…
‘Latent’ surplus populations and colonial histories of drought, groundnuts, and finance in Senegal
This article draws on Marx’s concept of ‘latent’ surplus populations to trace out and explain parallels between IBAI and colonial interventions in Senegal’s groundnut basin. Approaching the question in this way, the article highlights the long-run historical co-production and interdependence…
Participating in a vaccine trial for COVID-19 in Senegal: trust and information
This research aims to understand the level and determinants of people’s willingness to participate in a vaccine trial for COVID-19 in Senegal.
Research paper
Progress in the face of cuts: a qualitative Nigerian case study of maintaining progress towards universal health coverage after losing donor assistance
In the coming years, about a dozen middle-income countries are excepted to transition out of development assistance for health (DAH) based on their economic growth. This anticipated loss of external funds at a time when there is a need for…
Research paper
Qualitative exploration of health system response to COVID-19 pandemic applying the WHO health systems framework: Case study of a Nigerian state
Health systems have an important role in a multi-sector response to pandemics, as there are already concerns that COVID-19 will significantly divert limited health care resources. This study appraised the readiness and resilience of the Nigerian health system to the…
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
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…
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,…
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…
COVID-19 in Senegal: Exploring the Historical Context
While many academics and popular journalists have recently addressed historical epidemics in the context of COVID-19, much of this literature concerns the history of former colonial powers rather than the history of formerly colonized states. This review finds that the…
Extractivism, exclusion and conflicts in Senegal’s agro-industrial transformation
In the last two decades, the promotion of agro-industry has become a dominant developmental imperative on the African continent, leading to efforts to involve private-sector actors. This article examines the political economy and ecology of agro-industry in the Senegal River…
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…
Political distrust and the spread of COVID-19 in Nigeria
This study explores the impact of political distrust on the spread of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.
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
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
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…
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.
Policy document
Covid-19 Response Intra-Action Review (IAR) Report, Sierra Leone
This report details the findings of an Intra-Action Review (IAR) that was undertaken on the 22nd & 23rd September 2020, to review the COVID-19 response in Sierra Leone, focusing in particular on Surveillance, Laboratories, Case Management, Risk Communications, Food and…
Conjuring Biosecurity in the Post-Ebola Kissi Triangle: The Magic of Paperwork in a Frontier Clinic.
This article considers the increasing centrality of biosecurity and epidemiological surveillance as key priorities for the Sierra Leonean health care system after the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.
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…
Keeping People in Place: Political Factors of (Im)mobility and Climate Change
We delve into the socio-cultural and economic nature of (im)mobilities as they interact with political forces, specifically by exploring international bilateral agreements (Senegal) and a relocation program (Vietnam).
Lessons learned from engaging communities for Ebola vaccine trials in Sierra Leone: reciprocity, relatability, relationships and respect (the four R’s)
Building trust and engaging the community are important for biomedical trials. This was core to the set up and delivery of the EBOVAC-Salone and PREVAC Ebola vaccine trials in Sierra Leone during and following the 2014–2016 West African Ebola epidemic.…
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…
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
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
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…
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…
Corruption and “culture” in anthropology and in Nigeria
This article examines the publication and reception of a book about corruption in Nigeria as a form of ethnographic evidence that is useful to interrogate the fraught relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption. The evidence points to multiple…
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…
