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Conserving Nature, Transforming Authority: Eviction and Development at the Margins of the State The Niokolo-Koba National Park, Senegal
This dissertation examines two distinct but interrelated processes of displacement experienced by the evictees of the Niokolo-Koba National Park, based on fieldwork (2004-2005) in the Tambacounda region of South-Eastern Senegal.
Exceptional suffering? Enumeration and vernacular accounting in the HIV-positive experience.
Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I highlight the recursive relationship between Sierra Leone as an exemplary setting and HIV as an exceptional disease. Through this relationship, I examine how HIV-positive individuals rely on both…
A History of Urban Planning and Infectious Diseases: Colonial Senegal in the Early Twentieth Century
This paper deals with the spatial implications of the French sanitary policies in early colonial urban Senegal. It focuses on the French politics of residential segregation following the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Dakar in 1914, and their precedents…
‘Mobile transmigrants’ or ‘unsettled returnees’? myth of return and permanent resettlement among Senegalese migrants
Based on ethnographic research conducted among Senegalese migrants in the home country and in Italy, this paper demonstrates the existence, the logics, and functioning of a transmigrant movement made of people who are regular ‘comers and goers’ between Africa and…
Research paper
Rural-to-urban migration, kinship networks, and fertility among the Igbo in Nigeria
This paper presents ethnographic data to suggest that fertility behavior in contemporary Igbo-speaking Nigeria cannot be understood without taking into account the ways in which rural and urban social and demographic regimes are mutually implicated and dialectically constituted.
Corruption, NGOs, and development in Nigeria
This article examines corruption in Nigeria’s development sector, particularly in the vastly growing arena of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Grounded in ethnographic case studies, the analysis explores why local NGOs in Nigeria have proliferated so widely, what they do in…
Courting success in HIV/AIDS prevention: the challenges of addressing a concentrated epidemic in Senegal
This article presents findings from a study of HIV/AIDS programmes for urban sex workers in Dakar, Senegal. The objective of the research was to assess HIV prevention and treatment efforts to date, and to identify challenges that must be overcome…
Past horrors, present struggles: the role of stigma in the association between war experiences and psychosocial adjustment among former child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
We examined the role of stigma (manifest in discrimination as well as lower levels of community and family acceptance) in the relationship between war-related experiences and psychosocial adjustment (depression, anxiety, hostility and adaptive behaviors).
Flexibility in return, reconstruction and livelihoods in displaced villages in Casamance, Senegal
The paper argues that livelihoods research in situations of violent conflict and its aftermath can contribute to geographical understandings of flexibility. Such settings paradoxically demand greater flexibility from economic actors while imposing new and sometimes severe constraints on them to…
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…
Exploring the cultural context of HIV/AIDS pandemic in a Nigerian community: Implication for culture specific prevention programmes
The new face of Human Immune Virus (HIV)/ Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has earned its recognition as a social problem due to the associated devastating social and cultural consequences on the individual and the society at large. As such,…
Neoliberal Reform and Health Dilemmas
In this article, the author traces the links among neoliberalism, regional ecological decline, and the dynamics of therapeutic processes in rural Senegal. By focusing on illness management in a small rural community, the article explores how economic reform is mediated…
