School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Research Overview

Research Interests: Narrative and Visual Representations of HIV & AIDS, the Illness Narrative, Body-centred Storytelling, African and Black Love, Intimacies, and Sexualities, Stereotyping and Fetishism of Black ‘Bodies’ and Sexuality, Beauty and Aesthetics in Black/African/Diaspora Cultures, Negotiation of Pleasure, Pain, and Power for Black Women in Sexual Health Narratives, Afro-Feminist Approaches to Community Care and Selfcare, Community Co-Produced Health Narratives, De/colonialism and De/coloniality in African Medical Historical, Contemporary, and Speculative Writing, the Health Memoir, Disability and Chronic Illness

Research Methods: Arts-based Participatory Action Research in Healthcare, Ethnography, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Research Methods, Literary Fieldwork and Practice, Narrative & Discourse Analysis, Personal Storytelling in Practice, PhotoVoice, Qualitative Research, Transdisciplinary Research Design and Methodology, Visual and Sensory Ethnography

Subject Areas of Expertise:  African, African Diaspora, Afro-Indigenous and Black Studies, African Literature, Critical Heath and Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, Medical Anthropology, Narrative Medicine, Race and Ethnicity, Sexual and Reproductive Health 

Current research 

I am a literary scholar whose work on storytelling, narrative, and the body sits at the intersection of critical health and medical humanities and anthropology. Using a transdisciplinary approach, I combine critical, Black & African, literary, visual, and ethnographic studies to inform my analysis of epistemologies and cosmologies of health and wellbeing in Southern African and African diaspora contexts. Starting with my PhD research on HIV & AIDS in Malawian writing, I primarily engage ‘the illness narrative’ in African oral storytelling and print narratives to understand how ordinary people, within their communities, articulate and express their health ‘lifeworlds’. This includes, but is not limited to, knowing one’s body, self-advocating in healthcare settings, addressing sensitive and taboo discourses of personal health and social harm, and the dynamic aesthetic and creative forms that are used to produce representations of the body and illness. 

I conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork to supplement my training in the analysis of various literary practices (written and performed, real or imagined storytelling forms) in addition to archival research. My ongoing research centres creative expressions of intimacies in knowing the body (including its strengths, weaknesses, pleasures, and pain) with an emphasis on the ordinary person and the restoration of agency and bodily autonomy. I am fascinated by the ways that ordinary citizens use the arts and storytelling to create, re-create, imagine and re-imagine visions of the world that centres their needs and experiences. 

I adopt a decolonial framework to address the legacy of colonial medicine and health interventions that continue to inform shame, suppression, and the silencing of African voices. This reflects my commitment to destigmatizing and depathologizing Blackness and Black sexuality in ‘post-AIDS’ African and African diaspora health research through social justice and an ethical engagement of participant and community collaboration. Race, ethnicity, and constructions of marginalized identity are considered in my work to reflect neglected modalities of thinking about health in Africa.  

Previous grants

2018-2022 – Wellcome Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science  ‘Ulimbaso ‘You will be strong again’: How literary aesthetics and storytelling inform concepts of health and wellbeing in Malawi' at University of Edinburgh, Social Anthropology

2017-2018 – Wellcome Seed Grant ‘Tili Tonse (We are Listening): Mapping Oral Narratives and Storytelling Traditions Amongst Various Community Health Settings in Malawi’ at University of Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies

2014-2015 - Postdoctoral Fellow ‘Narratives of Magic and Medicine in British Central Africa Protectorate/Nyasaland: Journals of the Medical Missionaries from the Church of Scotland (1875-1915)’ at University of Edinburgh, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities

Past Projects 

• 2022-2023:    Participant: “Active Communities Arts Development: Social Prescribing, Sustainable Strategic Planning And Breaking Down Barriers Across Sectors In North Lanarkshire” AHRC/UKRI Co-Investigator award held by Dr Marisa de Andrade (University of Edinburgh) AH/W008912/1
• 2020-2022:    Participant: “Southern & East African Medical & Health Humanities (SEAMHH) Network” Wellcome Trust Collaborator in partnership with Dr Nolwazi Mkhwanazi (Witwatersrand) and Dr Carla Tsampiras (Cape Town) (£50,000)
• 2018-2020:     Associate: “Culture and Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Non-Communicable Disease Prevention in Malawi and Tanzania’ Board Advisor HRC-MRC Global Public Health Partnership Grant (£200,000)
• 2017-2022:    Associate:  “Chronic Disease in Africa’ Project Associate, 5-year Wellcome Trust Investigator Award held by Megan Vaughan at the Institute for Advanced Studies, UCL
• 2020-2021    Co-Applicant: "Understanding choice, control and risk in community responses to the COVID-19 epidemic across the health divide to inform public health strategies in Malawi’: Co-investigator on NIHR-funded COVID research Awarded to Dr Nicola Desmond and Behaviour & Health Research Team at Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Research Programme project funded by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) (£17,543)

Teaching

I have convened or co-taught the following courses within the department of Social Anthropology: 
Anthropology and Africa (SCAN10088 & PGSP11598), Culture & Power (SCAN10030), Empires (SCAN08010), The Ethnography Seminar (PGSP11042), Social Anthropology 1B: Anthropology Matters (SCAN08012)

I have also contributed to lectures within the Social and Political Science and across the University of Edinburgh. This includes but is not limited to: 
Anthropology of Global Health (PGSP11379), Body, Identity and Technology (DESI11176), Happiness: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (SCAN10043), Race and Ethnicity (SCIL10071), Understanding Race and Colonialism (SSPS08013) 
 

Topics interested in supervising

I am eager to supervise students with projects related to any of my research interests. In addition to receiving inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary projects, I am particularly keen to support disruptive or defiant research. Please email me to discuss your research proposal.

If you are interested in being supervised by me, please see the links below (opening in new windows) for more information:
PhD in Social Anthropology
MSc (R) Social Anthropology  

Ethics

I am currently the Subject Area Research Ethics Lead (SAREL) for Social Anthropology. If you are a member of staff or student in the Department of Social Anthropology and have any questions about the ethics design of your project, please email me at SPS EthicsSocAnth <ethics-SocAnth@ed.ac.uk>. 

Networking

I actively used my grants to build research communities and create intellectual spaces to support networking and collaboration for African practitioners in the critical health and medical humanities. These spaces continue expand their outreach and support through the creation of new thematic areas of research and applied practice that are pertinent to African lives. These spaces are rooted in an ethos which platforms empowerment through co-collaborative and equitable research design, and are led by African creative practitioners and researchers. 

In 2017, I founded the Malawi Medical Humanities Network through a Wellcome Trust Seed Award and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award to support the transition of the network to the Malawi University of Science and Technology in 2021. Since 2017, I supported the development in my capacity as an associate of the University of Pretoria-led Medical and Health Humanities Network Africa. The networks have hosted 4 Wellcome Trust-funded international conferences and several smaller regional and online symposiums and workshops. 

In December 2020, I received a Nominated Fellowship in the Medical Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh to re-establish a medical humanities network at the institute, which was funded by a University of Edinburgh Challenge Investment Fund (CIF) award in 2022. The result of my fellowship and subsequent funding led to the creation of the Edinburgh Health and Medical Humanities Network, which I currently co-direct with 3 colleagues.