My PhD research, Digital Mediation of Care Across Distance: Climate-Driven Migration and the Elderly Left Behind in Eastern Uganda, will explore how digital technologies are transforming caregiving relationships in the context of climate-induced migration. As environmental pressures increasingly affect rural livelihoods, many working-age adults migrate in search of economic opportunities, leaving older family members behind. This study will examine how mobile phones, social media platforms, and digital remittance services facilitate care across distance, shaping emotional connections, caregiving practices, access to resources, and health outcomes among elderly populations.
Situated at the intersection of the anthropology of health, migration studies, climate change, aging, and digital communication, the research seeks to understand how families adapt to social and environmental change through technology-mediated care. My interest in this project was informed by more than five years of professional experience working with communities affected by climate-related livelihood disruptions, providing valuable insights into the ways migration is reshaping family dynamics and support systems.
Funded under the HEALENAE Project 2: Climate Change, Migration, and Care for the Elderly, this project contributes to broader discussions on health, mobility, and environmental change by generating community-centered and evidence-based perspectives and understanding of how climate and migration challenges influence the wellbeing of older adults across Africa and Europe.
My name is Marie Cox, and I am a doctoral candidate in HEALENAE’s Project 4: Epidemics, disease, and state formation in Africa. I completed my BA in Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University before earning an MSc with distinction in Conflict, Security, and Development at the University of Edinburgh. Throughout my studies, I have been fascinated by questions of governance and state-building, with a particular focus on how institutions and communities respond to crises. These interests have gradually led me toward the study of global health and its role in political and social life.
My doctoral research explores how epidemics and infectious disease preparedness have influenced state formation and governance in Uganda. Epidemic preparedness is often understood as a public health issue. However, I examine it as a form of governance that influences how states build authority, collaborate with international organizations, and engage with local communities. My project investigates how gendered forms of care and community health work are not only essential to epidemic preparedness but also shape how public health systems and state authority are encountered in everyday life.
By combining historical research, policy analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, I aim to better understand how public health initiatives affect governance in practice and how these processes are experienced by the people involved. I am particularly excited about the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in Uganda and to learn from the diverse researchers, practitioners, and communities engaged in epidemic preparedness.
My name is Teddy Arach, and I will be working on an interdisciplinary research project that explores how climate-affected youth in Gulu, Northern Uganda, use digitally mediated social networks to navigate migration and support their psychosocial well-being. The project is supervised by Associate Professor Nanna Schneidermann at Aarhus University and co-supervised by Dr Stella Neema at Makerere University as part of the HEALENAE Doctoral Network.
Climate change is increasingly affecting livelihoods across Uganda, prompting many young people to migrate in search of education, employment, and improved living conditions. While migration can create new opportunities, it can also bring challenges such as social isolation, economic insecurity, stress, and the disruption of support networks. At the same time, the use of digital social networks has grown rapidly, particularly among young people. I am excited to investigate how digital platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram influence migration decisions among climate-affected youth while also supporting their psychosocial well-being through social connections, information sharing, and access to emotional and practical support.
I am particularly excited to engage directly with young people whose lives are being shaped by climate change. Their experiences offer important insights into how communities adapt to environmental challenges and how digital technologies are transforming everyday forms of care, resilience, and social connection. To explore these dynamics, I will use qualitative and ethnographic methods that foreground young people's perspectives and lived experiences.
What draws me most to this research is its interdisciplinary nature, which closely aligns with my academic and professional background in clinical practice, public health, and planetary health. I look forward to contributing policy-relevant knowledge that supports equitable, youth-centred adaptation strategies in climate-affected communities while working within a vibrant international research environment.
My name is Tia Scazighino, and I am a doctoral candidate in HEALENAE’s Project 6: Toxicity: Urban Living in Landscapes of Extraction. Under the co-supervision of Filip De Boeck at KU Leuven and Paul Wenzel Geissler at Oslo University, I will conduct a comparative study on the toxic fallout of colonial mining practices in South Africa and the UK. Through fieldwork in post-mining landscapes and brownfield sites, my project aims to uncover how the lived embodiment of toxicity manifests in physical and social health, and the transformation of urban life, labour, and spatial belonging.
Colonial mining activities in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa and North West England have led to the gradual pollution of soil, water, and air, causing intergenerational harm and making these places feel unliveable. Histories of racial capitalism and colonialism will help uncover the unequal distribution of health and environmental outcomes across landscapes, thus revealing how certain peoples and places are designated disposable.
I am particularly excited to investigate recent struggles over the right to live in clean and life-sustaining environments in both South Africa and the UK, illustrating how communal resistance and practices of “commoning” can function as counter-forces to toxic abandonment.
I am a PhD fellow in the HEALENAE Doctoral Network at Aarhus University's Department of Anthropology. I am a global health practitioner and researcher, and I have spent more than fifteen years working across Sub-Saharan Africa, including in Mozambique, Liberia, Uganda, and Kenya. Before joining Aarhus University, I worked with the American Cancer Society's Global Cancer Support team, supporting health system strengthening, cancer literacy, patient navigation, and oncology workforce development initiatives in East Africa. Throughout my career, I have been motivated by questions of health equity, particularly how social, environmental, and institutional conditions shape people's opportunities to access care and live well.
My PhD project explores gynecological cancer care pathways in East Africa, with ethnographic fieldwork centered in Uganda and a comparative analysis of policy environments in Uganda and Kenya. Jointly hosted by Aarhus University and Makerere University, the project examines how women, families, healthcare providers, and community support networks navigate cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. By following care journeys across clinics, communities, and homes, I hope to better understand how care continuity is maintained, interrupted, or transformed over time. More broadly, I hope the research will contribute to ongoing efforts to strengthen equitable cancer care systems while offering new insights into how people experience and navigate serious illness in their everyday lives.
I am Charlotte Auka, a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. My research is part of the HEALENAE Project 10, Biosecurity: Food, Health Risks and Animal Disease, led by Professor Michael Eilenberg at Aarhus University and Professor Salome Bukachi at the University of Nairobi.
My research examines how pastoralist households along the Kenya–Tanzania border experience Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreaks and biosecurity interventions. While state and global biosecurity frameworks often assume compliance with measures such as quarantine and vaccination, my work examines how these interventions are lived and negotiated within everyday pastoral livestock systems. I use the concept of the “intimate frontier” to describe how disease control measures become part of everyday life, shaped by concerns around livestock health, livelihoods, and household survival.
Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kajiado County, Kenya, I focus on how biosecurity is practiced across pastoral livestock systems, with attention to generational and gendered differences in knowledge and practice. Children, youth, and elders play different roles in animal care and disease monitoring, shaping how risk is understood and managed in everyday life.
The project builds on my broader research interests in anthropology and participatory methods, while opening new avenues for examining animal health and biosecurity in pastoralist settings. My project contributes to broader debates on biosecurity, pastoralism, social reproduction, and everyday forms of state-making in East Africa.
My name is Charlotte Sophie Bruns Knight, a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, Gender and African Studies at the University of Nairobi, supervised by Professor W. Onyango-Ouma at UoN and Professor Steven van Wolputte at KU Leuven.
This research project extends into small East African Indian Ocean coastal towns that remain underrepresented in global health and urban commons scholarship, despite being at the forefront of climate- and infrastructure-driven transformation. It does so by examining how residents of coastal Kenya perceive and navigate shared urban commons amid rapid urbanisation, large-scale infrastructure development, and intersecting socio-ecological pressures, and how these shifting dynamics shape uneven health outcomes across communities.
This work grows out of time spent in Lamu, an island town on Kenya's northern coast, where questions of urban commons acquire a tangible immediacy: how they are shared or lost; how environmental degradation becomes embodied harm; and whose knowledge counts in governing collective resources.
Through ethnographic fieldwork in Lamu and the wider coastal region, I aim to trace everyday negotiations over shared resources, examine governance as it is enacted through infrastructures, social relations, and institutional arrangements, and explore the mechanisms through which this interplay produces uneven health burdens across gender, generation, religion, and socio-economic position.
Central to this research is the framing of these processes by residents through Islamic governance structures, customary tenure, and Swahili epistemologies, which shape how environmental responsibility, authority, and collective life are understood along the Swahili coast. My earlier work with the Ustadh Mau Digital Archive (UMADA), on the manuscripts of the Lamu scholar-poet Ustadh Mau, introduced me to these traditions as living intellectual practices that continue to inform interpretations of environmental change, rather than static cultural heritage.
My name is Mizuki Igata. I was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, and hold a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Tokyo and an MA in Medical Anthropology and Mental Health from SOAS University of London. My sustained research interest lies in the uncertainty embedded in experiences of mental health problems, and the subjectivity of what is sometimes called "madness." I have conducted several fieldworks in Japanese mental healthcare settings.
My PhD project investigates how gambling becomes entangled with youth experiences of mental distress in Kampala, Uganda. Contemporary gambling epidemics in East Africa are often associated with male-dominated sports betting venues; however, the rapid expansion of mobile platforms has diversified gambling practices and rendered them increasingly invisible, making them accessible to wider groups, especially women and younger populations. Amid rapid capitalism and fluctuating living conditions, my project aims to capture how boundaries between opportunity, responsibility, and addiction are constructed, and how young people interpret and manage "risk" in a postcolonial urban environment.