Doctoral Candidate in project 13 - Sebastian Stopfer

Trained in Social Anthropology at the University of Bern and the University of Vienna academically and through many rich encounters with people from different walks of life, my research interests are situated at the intersection of environmental and medical anthropology. Interested in how colonial and capitalist structures produce environmental and bodily, I examined in my previous research projects in Bretagne/France and Martinique how people living in chemically contaminated environments navigate their illness trajectories and interpret them amidst colonialism´s afterlives, scaled economies and institutional neglect.
 

For my doctoral project under supervision of Wenzel Geissler and Herbert Muyinda, I expand my ethnographic interests towards how human mental distress & wellbeing, and access to therapeutic care are equally shaped by structural conditions. Taking the continuous underfunding of Kenyan mental healthcare services as a topical entry point, the doctoral project explores what forms of therapeutic care emerge, are neglected, or become marginalized amidst the country´s “silent epidemic” of “mental illness” as officially declared in 2019 by then-president Uhuru Kenyatta. By ethnographically centring the lived realities of people experiencing mental distress and their therapeutic trajectories shaped by Mombasa´s politically, socially and religiously diverse past and present, I then seek to extrapolate research participant´s experiences onto a more systemic level to explore questions such as:
• Who has the authority to define bodily harm and determine the specific healing approach thereof?
• How do genealogies of colonialism, colonial psychiatry and scaled economies determine whose bodies ought to heal and whose bodies ought to suffer?
• What are the responsibilities of nation-states towards their citizens with mental distress?
• How do citizens respond when nation-states fail to provide adequate mental healthcare infrastructures?
 

To engage with these questions, the research project is engaging with a rich literary body ranging from fields like Transcultural Psychiatry, Critical Ethnopsychiatry and Medical Anthropology to more recent debates on Global Mental Health. While existing scholarly accounts serve as the theoretical backbone, I seek to take research participants´ lived realities and interpretations thereof as central determinators for topical, theoretical and analytical choices.
I am very excited to be part of the HEALENAE cohort, and I am very much looking forward to engaging in lively and inspiring exchanges, discussions and support.