Event location
Guest Speaker Seminars will take place at Seminar Room 218, FHH (Frederik Holsts hus), 12:15-13:30.
Zoom link for those wishing to attend online.
Abstract
As nation-states notably in the global south heed to the clarion call of Universal Health Coverage to provide health as a public good accessible and affordable to all citizens. Citizens especially on the African continent continue to grapple with realities of unmet health needs through the lens of fragmented and often ill-equipped health systems. Despite, the rapid rise in experiments with universal health coverage promising to improve access and affordability to care, improvisations and connections remain the mainstay determinants in health restoration trajectories. Kenya is one state that continues to grapple with prolonged health worker strikes and constant stockouts in public healthcare systems, making visibility to available biomedical gaze an overreliance on networks of care. Our ethnographic narratives from varied field sites in Kenya, have exposed us to family-based, religious, economic, and digital networks of care as individuals (in)formally navigate fragile public healthcare spaces. Through our ethnographic insights, we tease out these complex networks of care as they (re)emerge across our field sites among ordinary and vulnerable citizens in their attempts to restore health.
About Edwin Ameso
Edwin Ambani Ameso is a postdoctoral Researcher at Leipzig University, Germany. He focuses on "Off-the-Grid": Infrastructures, Processes of Spatialization, and Drones in Africa. He holds a Joint PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark and University of Oslo, Norway. His doctoral research focused on health reforms notably Health insurance and social protection as key drivers towards Universal Health Coverage in Kenya. Edwin also holds a Masters and Bachelors degrees in Anthropology from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.
About Lena Kroeker
Lena L. Kroeker is project manager for and principal investigator of the DFG-funded project “(In)Security of the Kenyan Middle Classes: Social Mobility and the Fear of Falling” (DFG KR 5028/1-1), University of Bayreuth. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS), Germany and an M.A. from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2007. Her PhD focuses on pregnant women with HIV/AIDS in Lesotho; her current research analyses the Kenyan middle classes and their social security arrangements. Lena has taught courses in Historical Anthropology, African Linguistics, Sociology, and Conflict Studies.