Doctoral candidate in project 1 - Wahab Lawundeh

My name is Wahab Lawundeh, a PhD fellow in the HEALENAE Doctoral Network, working on Project 1: Metabolic Impacts: Agricultural Intensification and Health Transformations, supervised by Professor Ruth Jane Prince, University of Oslo, and Professor Rebecca Marsland, University of Edinburgh. I have a BSc in Sociology (Anthropology Option) from Njala University, Sierra Leone, and an MA in African Studies from the University of Basel, Switzerland. 

My project explores how agricultural intensification, particularly the growing use of agro-chemicals, is reconfiguring the relationships between food, bodies, health, and the environment among small-scale farmers in Kenya. In this project, I conceptualise ‘metabolic health’ not as a fixed biomedical endpoint; I rather approach it as biosocial. Hence, I am interested in understanding how these farming communities in Kenya experience and interpret bodily changes in relation to agricultural practices, and whether or not they connect rising rates of metabolic diseases to agro-chemical intensification. Amid the burgeoning transformation reshaping the Kenyan agricultural sector in the last few decades, I examine how these embodied experiences are bound up with shifts in labour, land use, climate variability, and policy.

Importantly, I also explore the broader political economy of agrochemicals, including the supply chain networks linking Europe and Kenya, to read local experiences within a transnational political economy of agriculture. I ultimately engage with scientific, policy, and activist groups (both international and local), with the aim of contributing ethnographically grounded insights to ongoing efforts dedicated to protecting human health and the environment.