Academic Interests
medical anthropology; global health; care and chronic disease; citizenship and the state; health systems; epidemics; anthropology of health insurance; environmental anthropology; chemical ethnography; anthropology of toxicity; postcolonial studies; East Africa; Kenya
Higher education and employment history
Ruth Prince is professor in medical anthropology at the Institute of Health and Society. She trained as an anthropologist at the universities of Copenhagen, UCL, and Oxford.
Ruth recently completed an European Research Council Starting Grant project titled "Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives". The project explores how African states are experimenting with social protection, healthcare and welfare, and what this means for citizenship, the state, and the public good in a context of increasing inequality and expanding private health care markets. Prince's research focused on health insurance and universal health care experiments in Kenya, following a) the work of state bureaucracies, b) the role of formal forms of social protection and informal social solidarity networks in mediating access to health care, and c) the transforming landscape of public health and private health care markets. The larger research team conducted ethnographic and historical research with state bureaucracies and global health actors, healthcare institutions, health insurance and digital health projects, and citizenship groups in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Ghana and Madagascar.
Before taking up her current position Ruth Prince was Senior Research Associate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Prior positions include a Mellon fellowship in "Science, Medicine and Society in Africa" held at the University of Cambridge and ESRC and Smuts Postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge (Centre for African Studies, Department of Social Anthropology).
Recent publications include a special issue "Curious Utopias" in Social Anthropology as well as special issues in Africa, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, African Studies Review, Visual Anthropology and Anthropology Today. Book projects include Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa, with Rebecca Marsland (Ohio UP, 2014), and Volunteer Economies, edited with Hannah Brown (James Currey, 2016). The Land is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya, written with Wenzel Geissler, was co-winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2010 Amuary Talbot Prize for best book in African Anthropology.
Recent research:
1) Care, solidarity and citizenship: an ethnographic exploration of Kenya's experiments with universal health care and health insurance (ERC StG 'UNIVERSAL HEALTH', 2018-2025)
2) "Chronic disease and care". Research on Kenya's cancer epidemic, focusing on how patients and families navigate care and treatment for cancer through social networks and well as formal financial technologies such as health insurance; and on oncological care in outpatient clinics (NRC FRISAM, 2013-2017 & ERC StG 'UNIVERSAL HEALTH', 2018-2025).
3) "Engagement and detachment: An ethnographic study of the moral dilemmas surrounding care in a public hospital". Research explored struggles surrounding care in a public hospital in Kenya in the context of austerity, growing socio-economic inequality, and the expansion of private medical markets. (Norwegian Research Council, FRISAM fellowship, 2013-2017).
4) "Developmental modernism in the east African city: Soviet medical aid to Kenya and its afterlives". Research explored legacies of the cold war in Kenya, drawing on archival work and oral histories of Kenyan doctors trained in the Soviet Union.
5) “Volunteer economies: Urban youth, labour, precarity, and the east African city”; Wellcome Trust collaborative pilot grant on “Street-level health workers in African cities” (2011-12).
6) “Humanitarian interventions and moral economies of care”: Focusing on urban Kenya, this project explored forms of claim-making taking shape around humanitarian and transnational interventions into health. (University of Cambridge Smuts fund, Mellon Foundation, and Max Planck institute for Social Anthropology) (2008-2011).
PhD supervision
- Emma Joanna Lengle
- Wahab Lawundeh
- Vilde Fastvold Thorbjørnsen (completed 2023)
- Cynthia Khamala Wangamati (completed 2019)
- Edwin Ambani Ameso (co-) (completed 2022)
- Samwel Ntapanda (co-) (completed 2022)
- Miriam Waltz (co-) (completed 2022)
- Signe Mikkelsen
- Mariam Yusuf Florence
- Hassan Njie (co-) (completed 2023)
- Alex Muriithi Gateri (co-)
- Lulu Tessua
- Kevine Oware Kamollah
- Bjørn Hallstein Holte (co-) (completed 2018)
Teaching
- SOSANT2530 - Development
- INTHE4113 - Medical Anthropology
- HES9280 - PhD course in Medical Anthropology
- INTHE4117 - Global Epidemics
- MF9295 - Global Health
- SOSANT2120 - Africa
Honoraria
- The Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amuary Talbot Prize for best book in African Anthropology, 2010. Awarded to "The Land is Dying Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in western Kenya" by PW Geissler & RJ Prince
- Winner of the RAI's Documentary Film Student Prize 2003. For "Adhiambo - Born in the Evening. Two Months in the Life of a Kenyan Mother and her Newborn Daughter". Prince, RJ, Geissler PW, Tuchtenhagen G., Neubert-Maric, M. 2002. (Digital Video Film, 68 min.). Copenhagen, Hamburg and Cambridge: Filmwerkstatt Dokumentarisch Arbeiten (Distr. Royal Anthropological Institute).
Research grants and appointments
- European Research Council Starting Grant (PI) (SH5) (2018-24) (1.5 million Euro)
- Norwegian Research Council FRIPRO, Global Health (PI, Co-PI) (2021-2026): "Epidemic Traces" (12 million NOK) and "Epidemics and African Health Systems" (12 mill NOK)
- NORHED (Norwegian Programme for Capacity Development in Higher Education and Research for Development), NORAD (Norwegian Agency for International Development): "Building Research Capacity in Medical and Environmental Anthropology for East Africa in the 21st-century" (AnthEM), 2021-2026, Co-PI): (20 million NOK)
- Norwegian Research Council FRISAM fellowship (2013-6)
- Senior Research Associate, Dep of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
- Mellon Fellow, University of Cambridge, 2010-12 (History and Philosophy of Science and Centre of African Studies)
- Smuts Research Fellow, Centre of African Studies, Cambridge, 2007-10
- ESRC Postdoctoral fellow, Dep of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 2007-8
Cooperation
- I work with partners in Kenya (University of Nairobi and Maseno University, and the Kenya Medical Research Institute, KEMRI), in Tanzania (the University of Dar-es-Salaam and the National Institute of Medical Research, NIMRI) and in Uganda (Makerere University)