Doctoral Candidate in project 9 - Charlotte Auka

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.