Question: How do recent changes to agricultural practices and economies of land-use and food production affect health and environment?

Aim: To study transformations in relationships between food, bodies, health and environment associated with the increased use of agro-chemicals in agriculture in East Africa.

Objectives:

1: To document small-scale farmers’ use of agro-chemicals in food production; 

2: To situate increased use of agro-chemicals in relation to a) changes in labour; b) changes in land use, access and ownership; c) climate change; d) government policies and interventions; e) the political economy of agro-chemicals; 

3: To explore how farming communities experience and articulate relationships between food, bodies, health, agriculture and agro-chemicals; 

4: To follow pathways of agro-chemicals between Europe and east Africa, including pesticide exports from Europe to east Africa.

5. To engage with local and international science, policy and activism concerning agro-chemical harm.

This PhD project will bridge medical and environmental anthropology by producing historically-informed, locally-specific knowledge of small-scale famers’ use of agro-chemicals in food production, the wider contexts feeding into this practice (such as changes in labour, land-use/ownership, climate change, and the marketing and (de)regulation of agro-chemicals), as well as the “downstream” effects of such practices. The study will also produce insights into how farming communities experience and articulate relationships between agro-chemicals, food, bodies, health and the environment, including whether and how they link rising rates of metabolic disease to agro-chemical intensification. Finally, the project will examine, and explore collaborative possibilities with, international and local scientific, policy and activist initiatives to protect humans and environment from agro-chemical harm. 

Aim: To study effects of climate and other entangled crises leading to adult migration in East Africa leaving elderly persons behind with care needs and/or study effects of African care labour migration to Southern Europe with an aging population and care needs.  

Objectives: 1: To describe impacts of climate, environmental and other changes on livelihood opportunities and migration patterns; 2: To explore effects of adult migration in relation to care for elders, including changes in family, generational and gender dynamics; 3: To examine global, national, and local economic and political dynamics, processes, and contestations that affect climate issues, migration, and care work; 4: To engage in collaborations with local and international civil society organisations concerning climate change, labour migration, remittances, and old age. 

Aim: To examine the geopolitical, economic, and social variables that sustain poisoned air-, water-, and landscapes in Southern Africa and Western Europe, and which cause human health affliction. These afflictions include parasitic infections, zoonotic illness, waterborne disease, cancer, reproductive harm, poisoning, and ailments that can be traced to toxic landscapes and chemical trails linked with agricultural pesticides and industrial emissions.

Objectives: 1: Examine the multiple strands of toxic pollutants and profit-driven economics that accelerate soil, water, and air toxicity and interrelated microbiomes such as the gut; 2: Examine the toxic - and often invisible -layering of environmental harms that contribute to uneven concentrations of pathogens in human lives; 3: Develop at least two ethnographic case studies that explore the relation between toxic layering, historical processes, and well-being; 4: Extend the focus of toxic harms beyond human affliction by drawing on post-humanist approaches that embrace animal and multispecies turns in anthropology.

Aim: To examine the evolution of local practices in relation to livestock husbandry and natural resource management (NRM) and their implications on biodiversity conservation and zoonotic infectious diseases in Kenya and Europe to see the variations in evolving livestock production farming systems in the different settings and their linkages to natural resource management and zoonotic diseases  

Objectives: 1: To explore the local knowledge and practice on livestock husbandry and NRM in relation to zoonotic infectious diseases; 2: To describe the perceptions of the community on the effects of local livestock husbandry practices and NRM practices on ecosystem services and disservices including zoonotic infectious diseases; 3: To explore the nature of the changing Anthropocene on practices on livestock husbandry and NRM practices and their relationship with risk of zoonotic infectious diseases; 4: To examine the drivers of the changes in the Anthropocene using a political economy lens and their implications on zoonotic infectious diseases in Kenya and Europe. 

Aim: To examine processes of state formation and how they have been shaped by epidemics and infectious diseases in Uganda.

Objectives 1: Historically review and compare how efforts to control epidemics and infectious diseases have shaped processes of state formation in Africa since the colonial period; 2: Examine from an anthropological perspective the impacts of international and European policies, funding, and regulation on governing epidemics and infectious diseases in Africa; 3: Develop at least one ethnographic case study of efforts by government agencies and international organisations including the EU aimed at controlling the spread of epidemics and infectious diseases in one country in Anglophone Africa; 4: To engage policymakers and practitioners in Africa and Europe, especially the EU. 

Across Africa communities are facing new kinds of challenges due to the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. One kind of response to climate change and related forms of crisis, are new types of migration, where especially young people are orienting towards new places for a better future.

The aim of this PhD study is to examine the health risks, opportunities and protective factors associated with youth migration in the context of climate change, and the adaptation strategies used to cope with these challenges. 

• How do youth perceive environmental degradation and how it intersects with their livelihoods, education, social life, and health?
• How is climate-change is associated with youth’s rural-urban migration within the continent, to Europe and the wider world, and how are migration decisions and experiences negotiated and managed?
• How do young migrants and their networks perceive the relationship between health, health risks and migration, and how are those risks are managed?

This research will contribute to the understanding of the relationship between young people’s climate change related mobilities and the health impacts of this migration. It will provide an understanding of how the youth perceive environmental degradation and how it intersects with their livelihoods, education, social life, and health. The study will also highlight youth’s adaptation strategies related to health challenges posed by climate change related migration.

Aim: To conduct a comparative study on the toxic fallout of extractive economies and its impact on urban life in South Africa and the UK.

Objectives: 1: To describe and compare evidence of older (colonial and early post-colonial) histories of toxicity and pollution of soil, water and air as a result of industrial coal mining, and their impact on daily urban living (based on bodily experience, scientific medical and toxicological data, and historical urban planning experiments); 2: To research the ecological, social and cultural impact on urban living of recent extractive practices and mining booms, and investigate how histories of toxicity affect processes of social and cultural mutation; 3: To investigate links between the production of toxic waste and industrial detritus and processes of displacement of populations, or how histories of toxicity are shaping migratory processes between rural and urban worlds, and are contributing to the post-colonial urban social condition; 4:To engage in collaborations with local and (inter)national academics, civil society organisations and expert activism concerning the social, cultural and environmental toxic fallout of large-scale industrial and artisanal mining activities.

Aim: To study the communicability of gynecological cancers (e.g. cervical/HPV or ovarian and vulva cancers) in Eastern or Southern Africa, regions that report some of the highest cancer incidences globally.

Objectives: 1: To describe and understand contagious potentials of gynecological cancers through attention to social, environmental and political structures such as healthcare,  gendered dynamics of reciprocity and care, and their biosocial entanglements (e.g. spread of HPV and HIV virus and stratified risks such poverty and pollution); 2: Ethnographically to examine global, national and local dynamics that affect the spread of gynecological cancers 3: To describe existing resources (political, social, technological) and improvisational characteristics of cancer prevention and detection, 4: To engage relevant stakeholders concerning the development of sustainable diagnostic and preventive measures.

Question: How is knowledge about toxic pollution¨, exposure and harm made, circulated and used to protect lives and environments – and what can anthropology contribute to this?

Aim: To study and participate in the making of evidence concerning toxic pollutants and human and ecosystem exposure , in East Africa and across local, national, and global levels.

Objectives:

1: To assess structures, history and capability of governmental research, regulation and monitoring of toxicants and attendant environmental and health risks;

2. To describe and compare different forms of evidence of toxic pollution and exposure, produced by state- and non-state actors, experts and laypeople, in a specific site or locality; 

3. To explore local and global interests, institutions, and processes involved in the documentation, scientific study, and response to a specific field of toxic pollution; 

4: To document emerging forms of individual, collective or institutionalised mitigation or contestation of toxic harm, in affected sites and wider environmentalist networks; 

5: To collaborate with scientists and activists between Africa and Europe who contest toxic pollution, its impacts on health and environment, and environmental policies;

6. To explore the potential of citizen science methods to expand evidence of harm and mobilise public and policy responses to it.

This PhD project will create ethnographic knowledge of how different forms of evidence of pollution, exposure, and effects are produced, shared, and contested, looking at a particular case of environmental harm (e.g. pesticides in agriculture or pollution from resource extraction or industry), or to a particular toxicant (e.g., heavy metals, agrochemicals, airborne particles). The project can cover field sites like, e.g., exposed communities and global scientific networks, public health provision and environmental regulation. In addition to participation and observation, the PhD project can use citizen science practices that will produce evidence in its own right (e.g., of toxicants’ presence or of harmful effects in a place or community). This grounded ethnographic examination of evidence-making will shed light on how evidence guides, or fails to enable, the control of toxic substances, the monitoring of their environmental distribution, and the protection of human and non-human life. This will facilitate improved evidentiary, activist, and monitoring practices for the specific locality and within national and global regulatoryrames.

Aim: To study the social and economic consequences of animal disease outbreaks (both zoonotic and non-zoonotic) and their impact on food security and human health in East Africa, and/or to examine the interrelation of transboundary animal diseases and biosecurity governance between East Africa and Europe.

Objectives 1: To document the history, spread and management of animal disease and biosecurity governance in East Africa and/or between East Africa and Europe; 2: To explore the interplay between traditional farming systems, free-ranging wildlife and practices of managing animal disease and risk; 3: To investigate the main drivers of animal disease and its anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic factors and study the interplay with national and international biosecurity governance structures and concerns; 4: To engage with regional and global networks working on traditional husbandry, food security and dilemmas of biosecurity in agriculture.

Aim: Critically re-evaluate ideas about (non) communicability by examining contemporary medical science accounts of ‘environment’ in the aetiology, diagnosis and imaginary of recovery and repair for NCDs such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and stunting in a South African setting. The aim is to examine the presumption that such disorders, usually described as ‘diseases of lifestyle,’ are not communicable. 

Objectives: 1: Trace the historical and contemporary distribution of one or a constellation of NCDs that are currently entities of concern; 2: Critically assess the definitional logics at play in medical explanations for this distribution, paying particular attention to the representation of structural factors; 3: Consider how ‘non-communicable’ diseases shape everyday life for those afflicted and the historicities of these processes of life-making; 4: Trace how ‘recovery’ and ‘repair’ are imagined in medical discourse and how these ideas settle in everyday lives shaped by NCDs. 

Aim: To study shared urban environment spaces and infrastructures and how they shape human health diversely in terms of how European policies, funding models and activist groups affect a Kenyan setting. 

Objectives: 1: To investigate how political, economic, social and cultural  environments impact people’s health in urban areas; 2: To assess shared infrastructures that affect health, e.g., green space, housing, access to clean water and food, clean air, transport, education 3: To explore personal health practices, e.g., physical activity, food consumption, drinking, smoking, and their influence on the prevalence of NCDs; 4: To document citizens’ active engagement (public participation) around environmental and health issues (including pollution, toxicity, air quality, waste disposal and sanitation) in their respective communities.

Aim: To study different endemic forms of gambling (online and offline) among youth (sports betting, crypto trade, online money games, lottery, fortune-telling) in an East African context and links to crises in the (social, economic, technological, natural) environment. 

Objectives: 1: To explore and identify different offline and online forms of gambling among youth in an African country; 2: To study the historical situatedness of gambling and probability practices, from in-situ games and fortune-telling to (online) betting and crypto market transactions and current changes in these; 3: To study relations between increased insecure environmental conditions of everyday lives of the youth in relation to gambling practices; to study gambling as (perceived) ways of securing uncertain future lives; 4: To study how people deal with risk and uncertainty related to the environment in a post-colonial context. 

Question: How do -epidemic measures against epidemics and other emergencies generate economic opportunities in a given social, political, historical and geographical context?

Aim: To analyse the translation of epidemics or natural emergencies into economic opportunities in contexts of institutional and infrastructural malfunctioning and breakdown

Objectives: 

1: To study the interface between economic processes and policy or technical responses to epidemics or emergencies over time.

2: To explore political and organisational factors affecting economic opportunities and their use by different actors during epidemics or natural disasters . 

3. To acknowledge fragility and temporariness of anti-epidemic and emergency responses, including effects of shifts and withdrawals, and the resulting loss of economic opportunity.

4. To reflect on how the translation of anti-epidemic and emergency responses into economic opportunities affects such interventions’ reputation, uptake and efficacy.

We invite students of social or medical anthropology proposing research on sites and situations marked by intensive and long-term antiepidemic or emergency-response interventions, such as, e.g. regions of Africa heavily affected by HIV/AIDS interventions, Ebola preparedness or Covid-19 response, or by draught prevention and flood relief - or similar interventions with potential economic impact. Such studies may be about short-term economic effects of these interventions and responses, or about long-term cumulative economic and social transformations caused by external interventions. Not least, projects could explore the consequences of the collapse or withdrawal of such interventions such as, e.g., the local economic effects of the ongoing reduction of northern aid budgets, as well as the economic afterlives of interventions.

Aim: To study the response to changing patterns of vector borne disease (VBD) in humans and livestock animals in a frontier region of East Africa and/or Europe where climate related ecological change has led to increased populations of disease-bearing insect vectors.

Objectives: 1: Review policies that respond to climate-related changes in the geographical distribution of insect vectors of disease (mosquitoes, fleas, or ticks) in humans and their livestock. 2: Produce case studies documenting community-based observations of changes in ecological and disease landscapes: rainfall, flooding, seasonality, temperature, insect populations, symptoms of illness in humans and livestock. 3: Examine ethnographically adaptations to VBD made by public health, clinical, and veterinary services, and community members, eg learning to identify vectors and symptoms of disease, use insecticides and other preventative methods, change domestic arrangements and livestock management methods, identify appropriate health interventions. 4: Describe and analyse the historical and political factors that determine the flow of expertise and uptake (or not) of knowledge about VBD between: endemic and frontier regions, and Africa and Europe.