Ruth Jane Prince

• Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Mangesho, Peter Ernest; Biesen, Caroline Meier Zu; Tessua, Lulu & Tingira, Anitha [Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2026). 13 Precarity, Exposure, Toxicity, Evidence. I Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J.; Kitanaka, Junko & Raikhel, Eugene (Red.), Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century - Rutgers University Press. Rutgers University Press. ISSN 9781978845909. s. 217–234. doi: 10.36019/9781978845916-017. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century provides readers with a comprehensive survey of topics, methodologies, and theories in the discipli...

• Muinde, Jacinta Victoria S.; Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2026). ‘Corona is Over’: Temporalities and Material Afterlives of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Kenya. Medical Anthropology. ISSN 0145-9740. s. 18–18. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2710415. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  After what most Kenyans experienced as the “end of Covid” in 2021–22, material remains of anti-epidemic measures, biological traces such as long covid, and memories of deaths persisted. While infection itself left few visible material traces, paraphernalia of its control – masks, tests, handwashing stations, and routines – proved more durable, although often losing or changing their function and meaning. This paper examines Covid-19 residues in western Kenya, their state and use, the meanings people assign, and how they disappear or sediment among leftovers of other epidemics, shaping future pathways unpredictably. We reflect on the afterlives of epidemics in Kenya and elsewhere.

• Yusuf, Mariam Florence; Onyango-Ouma, Washington; Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2025). Vaccinations, Pills, and Resistance: School Health Campaigns in Kenya During the COVID Pandemic. Medical Anthropology. ISSN 0145-9740. 44(8), s. 727–741. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2598641. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2025). Confronting Failure and its Consequences in a Kenyan Public Hospital. Social Anthropology. ISSN 0964-0282. 33(4), s. 38–56. doi: 10.3167/saas.2025.330404. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Stepney, Nickolas Surawy; Bhangu, Shagufta; Llewellyn, Henry; Fraser, Jennifer; Cochrane, Thandeka & Jagessar, Philip [Vis alle 18 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2025). Provincialising Global Oncology. BMJ Global Health. 10(11). doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2025-019950. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Global Oncology is an important project and concept which has made significant strides in recent years. Its laudable achievements in tackling cancer’s medical and human impacts have worked to address the ‘oncological divide’. To strengthen the project’s core aims, we call to ‘provincialise’ its goals and techniques by bringing in voices of experts on the ground, in particular from the Global South. This is crucial to strengthening Global Oncology, setting its agendas, suturing its standards and norms with on-the-ground realities, and considering complex and diverse dynamics of difference and inequality. Through provincialising, we advocate for a move towards plural oncologies.

• Yusuf, Mariam Florence; Onyango‐Ouma, Washington; Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2025). In the shadow of HIV: Fear, rumor, and stigma among young women living with HIV during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Western Kenya. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. ISSN 0745-5194. doi: 10.1111/maq.70026. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Abstract Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID‐19 pandemic and related vaccine controversies. Focusing on the lives of young women living with HIV, the article traces how their experiences of navigating HIV care, stigma, and gendered expectations intersected with anxieties around COVID‐19 vaccination. These narratives are embedded within a broader historical and social landscape marked by grief, moral judgement, and structural exclusion. Past experiences with HIV are shown to inform contemporary fears around vaccination, reigniting multi‐layered forms of stigma and casting women's bodies as sites of risk, suspicion, and control. By situating these responses within the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic, the article highlights how disease, memory, and gendered moralities continue to shape health experiences and interventions in deeply unequal ways.

• Ameso, Edwin Ambani & Prince, Ruth Jane (2025). Visions of Community Health and the Social Good in Kenya: Turning Community Health Workers into Entrepreneurs. Development and Change. ISSN 0012-155X. 56(2), s. 278–305. doi: 10.1111/dech.12877. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In East Africa, social enterprises that fuse development work with entrepreneurial activities and a language of ‘innovation’ are becoming prominent. Critical of the NGO/donor model, which they hold as unsustainable, such organizations are funded by corporate investment and philanthropic capital but aim for self‐reliance through enlisting local actors to market social services, while providing loans, digital infrastructures and training in entrepreneurship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya, this article examines the ethos, ambitions and practices of one such enterprise operating across Africa — Healthy Entrepreneurs. This not‐for‐profit organization seeks to enable community health workers to become ‘health entrepreneurs’ by training them in business management and offering them a loan and mobile phone from which they order health commodities online and sell them to rural communities. Focusing on the perspectives, motivations and experiences of local managers and the entrepreneurs themselves, the article explores relations between entrepreneurism, community health work, sustainability and the ‘social good’, and the frictions surrounding them. The model of turning community health workers into entrepreneurs, which fosters competition while placing the burden of success onto the individual, shifts the ethos of community health work towards a focus on business. However, the moral economies in which community health entrepreneurs are embedded complicates this picture.

• Wangamati, Cynthia Khamala; Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Nyambedha, Erick Otieno & Prince, Ruth Jane (2025). Health providers’ perspectives on effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-epidemic measures on maternal health services in Nairobi, Kenya: a qualitative study. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth. 25(1). doi: 10.1186/s12884-025-07500-8. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Background The first case of COVID-19 in Kenya was confirmed in March 2020; the Kenyan government swiftly introduced measures to curb transmission, some of which negatively impacted maternal health services. Most research on the effects of COVID-19 on maternal health is from the perspectives of pregnant women and mothers. Our study explores health providers’ perspectives on the effect of COVID-19 on maternal health services in Nairobi, Kenya. Methods From February to May 2023, we conducted key informant interviews with 39 health providers in Nairobi County, Kenya. Study participants included medical doctors/officers, clinical officers, nurses, and community health assistants. Thematic inductive and deductive analysis were used to analyze the data; coding was done using NVIVO. Results The interviewed health providers confirmed that COVID-19 prevention and infection control measures had negatively affected maternal health services. The measures led to the temporary closure of health facilities because there was a shortage of health providers due to their deployment in isolation centers and quarantine, and some contracted COVID-19, restricted access to maternal health services, and delayed service delivery due to social distancing. Health providers stated that they faced numerous challenges, including fear of and contracting COVID-19, being overworked as they were short-staffed, limited resources, stigma from the community as they were considered infectious, and psychological distress. In addition, health providers said that the Kenyan government addressed some challenges by providing personal protective equipment, prioritizing health providers for vaccination, facilitating their movement, and providing temporary tax relief. Conclusion Our findings highlight the negative effect of COVID-19 on maternal health services in Kenya. Future pandemic preparedness should entail proper planning, staffing, training, psychosocial support, and staff motivation through the provision of risk allowance and health insurance. In addition, funds should be set aside for purchasing medical supplies, equipment, and vaccines, building isolation centres, and other contingencies.

• Prince, Ruth Jane (2024). Blurring ‘social justice’ with ‘market justice’ in recent experiments with healthcare and social protection in the Global South. Global Social Policy. ISSN 1468-0181. 24(2), s. 331–335. doi: 10.1177/14680181241261476. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Muinde, Jacinta Victoria Syombua; Kehr, Janina & Prince, Ruth Jane (2023). Health for all? Pasts, presents and futures of aspirations for universal healthcare. Social Science and Medicine. ISSN 0277-9536. 319. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115660. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this special issue, we bring together anthropological and historical work that considers successive aspirations towards ‘health for all’: their pasts, their futures, and their diverse meanings and iterations. Across the world, hopes for providing ‘health for all’ were central to nation building in the long 20th century, and for international relations, particularly after the second world war and the establishment of the WHO. Health became seen as a fundamental good by citizens of North and South and has remained a central force shaping global and national politics until today. But what does ‘health for all’ actually mean, and how did it come to matter? In this introduction we approach ‘health for all as a situated, multi-faceted phenomenon, that - while having a shared aspiration towards universality of access and equality of care - comes into focus in partial, diverse and contentious policies, programmes, projects and practices. Beyond homogenising narratives that frame ‘health for all’ in terms of either success or failure, the special issue highlights the diverse iterations that ‘health for all’ has taken on the ground for different subjects and groups of people, exploring exclusions and limitations as well as dreams and aspirations.

• Prince, Ruth Jane (2023). Private health care, cancer, and the vulnerable middle class in Kenya. American Ethnologist. ISSN 0094-0496. 50, s. 595–608. doi: 10.1111/amet.13219. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  A novel terrain of health care is emerging in Kenya at the intersection of a cancer epidemic, expanding medical and health insurance markets, the continued evisceration of public health care, and a middle class that can raise funds from credit, loans, and social networks. As middle-class cancer patients and their families navigate these landscapes, they find themselves vulnerable both to the “ordinary crisis” of public health care undermined by austerity and neglect, and to an extractive medical marketplace offering state-of-the-art treatment that is just within, or just beyond, financial reach. To analyze this, I build on Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, which captures how precarity is not only grounded in economic realities but also tied to hopes and expectations that always remain unfulfilled, creating constant anxiety and exhaustion. Further, I examine the double binds of cancer treatment and the entanglements between medical, health, and economic precarities, as families are drawn into private health care while the state disinvests in public services.

• Prince, Ruth Jane (2022). Beyond Failure: Bureaucratic Labour and the Will to Improve in Kenya’s Experiments with Universal Health Care. Social Anthropology. ISSN 0964-0282. 30(2), s. 56–80. doi: 10.3167/saas.2022.300205. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In a radical move that recalled the egalitarian promises of Kenya's post-independence years, the Kenyan government recently made all public health care free, for residents in four counties, for a period of one year. Drawing on ethnographic research on these ambitions for ‘universal health coverage’, this article follows civil servants tasked with the delivery of public services as they attempt to translate an experimental policy into practice and encounter repeated and ongoing failure. These officials had long experiences of health system failures and did not expect success this time either. Yet, they planned and delivered interventions in a hopeful mood, maintaining a sense of purpose and bracketing a sense of doubt and cynicism. Utopian projects like universal health care offer interesting sites for ethnographic research – not only because of what they set out to achieve, but because of what they generate along the way, including hopeful engagements. I study how bureaucracy may be a site of hope and optimism in the post-colonial state's capacity to improve lives, even while bureaucrats have ample experience of its failures. I explore how bureaucrats sought to engage failure and success as partial and productive, allowing a space in which they could deliver some form of public good.

• Muinde, Jacinta Victoria Syombua & Prince, Ruth Jane (2022). A new universalism? Universal health coverage and debates about rights, solidarity and inequality in Kenya. Social Science and Medicine. ISSN 0277-9536. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115258. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Neumark, Tom (2022). Curious Utopias: Dreaming Big Again in the Twenty-first Century? Social Anthropology. ISSN 0964-0282. 30(2), s. 1–15. doi: 10.3167/saas.2022.300202. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This special issue focuses on a trend that appears to run counter to the recent fascination with scaled-down solutions to world problems. From the predictive powers of Big Data in Kenya to market-driven humanitarian attempts to tackle the world’s ills, dreams of massive biometric identification in India and visions of health care ‘for all’, we are seeing a return to ostensibly, sometimes self-avowedly, ‘utopian’ imaginations and schemes of economic, political and societal transformation. These evoke a ‘universal’ scale, a politics of amelioration and ideas of social justice, routinely draw on a language of the collective, the public and the commons, while relying heavily on market logics and the privatisation of public goods. Such contradictory utopianism, and its inevitable failures, easily invites dismissal. Avoiding the comfort of this kind of critique, the contributors to this special issue draw on the idea of curiosity in its two senses. On the one hand, these utopias are themselves curious in the sense of being peculiar. Being reformative rather than radical, they seem to offer pared-down visions of social change, which remain within the status quo. On the other hand, a proper appreciation of their peculiarity requires curiosity. Grounded in ethnographic and historical research, the special issue explores the varied ambitions, relations and temporalities that inhabit newforms of utopianism, including their limitations and possibilities, hopes and failures, their engagements with policies and social movements, publics, markets and states, as well as the other political forms and social collectives that they support, subvert or ignite.

• Ameso, Edwin Ambani & Prince, Ruth Jane (2022). Striking health workers: Precarity and healthcare in neoliberal Kenya. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 38(4), s. 11–14. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12742. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2021). Malignant stories: the chronicity of cancer and the pursuit of care in Kenya. I Vaughan, Megan; Adjaye-Gbewonyo., Kafui & Marissa, Mika (Red.), Rethinking Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives.. UCL Press. ISSN 9781787357051. s. 322–349. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Neumark, Tom & Prince, Ruth Jane (2021). Digital health in East Africa: Innovation, experimentation and the market. Global Policy. ISSN 1758-5880. 12(6), s. 65–74. doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12990. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Across East Africa, mobile phones and tablets are increasingly sitting in the hands of community health workers, clinicians, managers and patients. They are being used for a widening range of functions from diagnostics to health insurance to treatment advice, generating hopes for new healthcare futures and establishing the region as an emerging hub of experimentation in digital health. Drawing on our on-going ethnographic and anthropological research in Kenya and Tanzania, this article explores the dynamic, varied, experimental, and increasingly financialised terrain of formal digital health projects. While innovation in digital health is a growing feature of healthcare across the globe, in East Africa it is entering into a region already long characterised by NGOised, fragmented and vertical healthcare systems and heavy dependence on foreign capital. This presents challenges to efforts, including the WHO’s Universal Health Coverage agenda, to foster national and equitable public healthcare systems. In exploring these issues, we recognise the power, and often deleterious effects, of financial capital that foregrounds markets in global digital health, but we also open space for a (still critical) recognition of East African-led digital and data technology movements.

• Prince, Ruth Jane (2021). Cancer and contaminated food: Toxic uncertainties in western Kenya. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 37(4), s. 3–6. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12662. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  During fieldwork on cancer in Kisumu, western Kenya, the author slowly began, like those around her, to ask questions about its location and its temporalities, its beginnings and endings, its boundaries and entanglements with toxicants. In this article, the author describes the landscapes of exposure that people in western Kenya associate with an increasingly visible cancer epidemic, including concerns based on partial and tentative knowledge about the toxicity of foods. Starting from conversations about cancer, home, food and toxicity, she moves towards livelihoods, economies and ecologies, and the food and agricultural systems in which these exposures and uncertainties are embedded.

• Aukrust, Camilla Grøver; Kamalo, Patrick Dongosolo; Prince, Ruth Jane; Sundby, Johanne; Mula, Chimwemwe & Manda-Taylor, Lucinda (2021). Improving competencies and skills across clinical contexts of care: a qualitative study on Malawian nurses' experiences in an institutional health and training programme. Nursing Open. 8, s. 3170–3180. doi: 10.1002/nop2.1030. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Aim To explore what competencies and skills Malawian nurses gained after participating in an institutional health and training programme in Norway and how they viewed these competencies applicable upon return to Malawi. Furthermore, to examine facilitators and challenges experienced on the exchange programme and opportunities and obstacles to make the competencies usable in own local hospital context. Design Qualitative study with an explorative design. Methods Fourteen interviews and one focus group discussion were conducted at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Blantyre, Malawi, from August to September 2018. Results Competencies gained in Norway included clinical skills, teamwork, coordination and strengthened professionalism. The main finding was that the exchange programme was a transformative experience. Upon return to Malawi, the competencies gained on the exchange were helpful. However, the return was characterized by mixed emotions due to the considerable difference between the two clinical settings.

• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2020). Toxic Worldings: Introduction to the special issue. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 36(6), s. 3–4. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12615. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In the course of recent world history, humans have permanently changed the chemical composition of the planet, as human‐made chemical substances become part of the air, water and soil, pervading human and non‐human bodies and upsetting linear imaginaries of past and future. The slow violence of toxic exposure associated with industrial activity and economic growth is a particularly insidious dimension of inequality and exploitation, woven into global and post‐colonial relations of race, class and gender. Yet industrial chemicals underlie and support modern forms of life, and livelihoods, as well as our unsustainable economic system. Such tensions shape how toxicity may be located or ignored, resisted or made habitable, how it may congeal into matters of concern or dissipate into modes of ‘unknowing’. In this introduction, the authors review how recent scholarship imagines and engages with toxic flows. Inspired by research in environmental humanities, geography, history and science and technology studies, as well as scientific disciplines such as eco‐toxicology, anthropologists are searching to grasp the ambivalent ways in which humans ‐ and our non‐human companions ‐ recreate, inhabit, make use of, are exposed to and resist toxic worldings.

• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2020). Layers of epidemy: Present pasts during the first weeks of COVID‐19 in western Kenya. Centaurus. Journal of the European Society for the History of Science. ISSN 0008-8994. 62(2), s. 248–256. doi: 10.1111/1600-0498.12295. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The epidemic of COVID‐19 appears to be reshaping the world, separating before and after, present and past. Its perceived novelty raises the question of what role the past might play in the present epidemic and in responses to it. Taking the view that the past has not passed, but is present in is material and immaterial remains, and continuously emerging from these, we argue that it should not be studied as closed narration but through the array of its traces, which constitute the texture of the present. To that end, and building on long‐term ethnographic research on past and present epidemics in western Kenya, we assemble here some preliminary observations on the first weeks of COVID‐19 in Kenya. We explore how the acute epidemic crisis currently unfolding is intertwined with layered fragments of earlier epidemic events, attending to material infrastructures, institutional practices, and ritual responses, to the presence of virally loaded bodies, pharmaceuticals, and their residues, and to the resurgence of often painful memories and emotions. People in this region have experienced a long century of epidemics and anti‐epidemic measures of varying duration and intensity, from colonial and postcolonial sleeping sickness and smallpox to HIV/AIDS and more recently cancer, alongside actual or anticipated outbreaks of cholera and Ebola. This local perception of one long epidemic qualifies the notion of a radical temporal break that the COVID‐19 pandemic is often associated with in European conversations.

• Prince, Ruth Jane (2020). From Russia with love: Medical modernities, development dreams, and cold war legacies in Kenya, 1969 and 2015. Africa. ISSN 0001-9720. 90(1), s. 51–76. doi: 10.1017/S0001972019001025. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Wangamati, Cynthia Khamala; Sundby, Johanne; Chimaraoke, Izugbara; Nyambedha, Erick Otieno & Prince, Ruth Jane (2019). Challenges in Supporting Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse in Kenya: A Qualitative Study of Government and Non-governmental Organizations. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. ISSN 0886-2605. doi: 10.1177/0886260519846864. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Wangamati, Cynthia Khamala; Yegon, Gladys; Sundby, Johanne & Prince, Ruth Jane (2019). Sexualised violence against children: A review of laws and policies in Kenya. Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters (SRHM). 27(1), s. 1586815–1586815. doi: 10.1080/26410397.2019.1586815. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a major global health challenge. Extant literature shows that CSA is prevalent in Kenya. As a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Kenyan government is mandated to ensure that children are protected from sexual abuse through sound laws and policies. This paper reviews existing laws and policies on CSA and highlights their strengths and weaknesses. Our findings indicate that laws on child protection exist and are protective to a large extent, as harsh penalties are outlined for sexual offences. Survivors of CSA are entitled to free legal and medical services. However, there are no reparations offered to survivors in criminal proceedings. Moreover, there is no legislation on age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education which plays an important role in cultivating positive gender norms and describing what constitutes CSA and reporting procedures. The national standard operating procedures for the management of sexual violence against children lack CSA screening procedures. There is urgent need for review of these laws and policies and development of multisectoral protocols at the national and county level, that outline roles and responsibilities for various service providers, supervisory and accountability measures and referral networks.

• Prince, Ruth Jane (2019). Pandemic Publics: How Epidemics Transform Social and Political Collectives of Health. I Kelly, Ann H; Keck, Frederic & Lynteris, Christos (Red.), The Anthropology of Epidemics. Routledge. ISSN 9780367581947. s. 135–153. doi: 10.4324/9780429461897. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Wangamati, Cynthia; Sundby, Johanne & Prince, Ruth Jane (2018). Communities’ perceptions of factors contributing to child sexual abuse vulnerability in Kenya: a qualitative study. Culture, Health and Sexuality. ISSN 1369-1058. 20(12), s. 1394–1408. doi: 10.1080/13691058.2018.1438666. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2018). Death, Detachment, and Moral Dilemmas of Care in a Kenyan Hospital. I Robben, Antonius C. G. M. (Red.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781119222422. s. 445–460. doi: 10.1002/9781119222422.ch31. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Storeng, Katerini Tagmatarchi; Prince, Ruth Jane & Mishra, Arima (2018). The politics of health systems strengthening. I Parker, Richard & Jonathan, Garcia (Red.), Routledge Handbook on the Politics of Global Health. Routledge. ISSN 9781315297231. doi: 10.4324/9781315297255-11. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2017). Universal Health Coverage in the Global South: New models of healthcare and their implications for citizenship, solidarity and the public good (OPEN ACCESS). Michael. ISSN 1893-9651. 14(2), s. 153–172. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). Public health and global interventions in Africa. Current history (1941). ISSN 0011-3530. 115(781), s. 163–168. doi: 10.1525/curh.2016.115.781.163. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). Kisumu: global health amnesia. Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Twenty First Century Africa.. Intellect Ltd.. ISSN 9781783207251. s. 209–213. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Lynteris, Christos & Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). Lynteris, Christos & Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). Anthropology and Medical Photography: Ethnographic, Critical and Comparative Perspectives. Visual Anthropology. ISSN 0894-9468. 29(2), s. 101–117. doi: 10.1080/08949468.2016.1131104. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). The Diseased Body and the Global Subject: The Circulation and Consumption of an Iconic AIDS Photograph in East Africa. Visual Anthropology. ISSN 0894-9468. 29(2), s. 159–186. doi: 10.1080/08949468.2016.1131517. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2015). Seeking Incorporation? Voluntary labor and the ambiguities of work, identity, and social value in contemporary Kenya. African Studies Review. ISSN 0002-0206. 58(2), s. 85–109. doi: 10.1017/asr.2015.39. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Abstract: This article seeks to understand why Kenyans have responded so enthusiastically to the recent push, by the government and NGOs, for voluntary labor within health and development projects and interventions. It argues that voluntary labor gains meaning and value in relation to broader economies of work and unemployment, to anxieties about identity, recognition, and belonging, and to aspirations for personal as well as national development. In the context of precarious economies and the contraction of formal employment opportunities, voluntary labor constitutes valued, if unpaid, work; it offers opportunities for those excluded from formal employment to gain a valued identity and a sense of social worth; and it makes volunteers visible to powerful institutions (state and nonstate) that hold the keys to personal growth, social recognition, and developmental futures. Voluntary labor is a site of struggles about identity, social value, and recognition, which the decline of twentieth-century trajectories of progress has made acute.

• Brown, Hannah & Prince, Ruth Jane (2015). Introduction: volunteer labor-pasts and futures of work, development, and citizenship in East Africa. African Studies Review. ISSN 0002-0206. 58(2), s. 29–42. doi: 10.1017/asr.2015.36. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2014). Precarious Projects: Conversions of (Biomedical) Knowledge in an East African City. Medical Anthropology. ISSN 0145-9740. 33(1), s. 68–83. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2013.833918. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Otieno, Phelgona (2014). In the Shadowlands of Global Health: Observations from Health Workers in Kenya. Global Public Health. ISSN 1744-1692. 9(8), s. 927–945. doi: 10.1080/17441692.2014.941897. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  During the past decade, donor funding for health interventions in Kenya and other African countries has risen sharply. Focused on high-profile diseases such as HIV/AIDS, these funds create islands of intervention in a sea of under-resourced public health services. This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in HIV clinics and in a public hospital to examine how health workers experience and reflect upon the juxtaposition of ‘global’ medicine with ‘local’ medicine. We show that health workers face an uneven playing field. High-prestige jobs are available in HIV research and treatment, funded by donors, while other diseases and health issues receive less attention. Outside HIV clinics, patient's access to medicines and laboratory tests is expensive, and diagnostic equipment is unreliable. Clinicians must tailor their decisions about treatment to the available medical technologies, medicines and resources. How do health workers reflect on working in these environments and how do their experiences influence professional ambitions and commitments? © 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article. Non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, is permitted. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.

• Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Kelly, Ann H; Manton, John; Prince, Ruth Jane & Tousignant, Noemi (2013). Introduction: Sustaining the Life of the Polis. Africa. ISSN 0001-9720. 83(4), s. 531–538. doi: 10.1017/s0001972013000430. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2013). Navigating Global Health in an East African City. I Prince, Ruth Jane & Marsland, Rebecca (Red.), Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives. Ohio University Press. ISSN 9780821420584. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2013). Situating Health and the Public in Africa. I Prince, Ruth Jane & Marsland, Rebecca (Red.), Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives. Ohio University Press. ISSN 9780821420584. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Madiega, Philister Adhiambo; Jones, Gemma; Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2013). "She's My Sister-In-Law, My Visitor, My Friend" Challenges of Staff Identity in Home Follow-Up in an HIV Trial in Western Kenya. Developing World Bioethics. ISSN 1471-8731. 13(1), s. 21–29. doi: 10.1111/dewb.12019. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Kelly, Ann H; Manton, J & Tousingnant, N (2013). Sustaining the life of the African Polis. Africa. ISSN 0001-9720. 83(4), s. 531–538. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2013). 'Tarmacking' in the millennium city:spatial and temporal trajectories of empowerment and development in Kisumu, Kenya. Africa. ISSN 0001-9720. 83(4), s. 582–605. doi: 10.1017/S0001972013000478. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2012). HIV and the Moral Economy of Survival in an East African City. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. ISSN 0745-5194. 26(4), s. 534–556. doi: 10.1111/maq.12006. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Marsland, Rebecca (2012). What is Life Worth? Exploring Biomedical Interventions, Survival and the Politics of Life. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. ISSN 0745-5194. 26(4), s. 453–469. doi: 10.1111/maq.12001. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2010). Persons, plants and relations: treating childhood illness in a western Kenyan village. I Hsu, Elisabeth & Harris, Stephen (Red.), Plants, Health and Healing.On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781845450601. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2010). Purity is Danger: Ambiguities of Touch around Sickness and Death in Western Kenya. I Dilger, Hansjörg & Luig, Ute (Red.), MORALITY, HOPE AND GRIEF. Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781845456634. s. 240–270. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2010). Purity is Danger: Ambiguities of Touch around Sickness and Death in Western Kenya. I Dilger, Hansjörg & Luig, Ute (Red.), MORALITY, HOPE AND GRIEF. Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781845456634. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2007). Christianity, tradition, AIDS, and pornography : knowing sex in western Kenya. I Littlewood, Roland (Red.), On Knowing and Not Knowing in the Anthropology of Medicine. Left Coast Press Inc.. ISSN 9781598742756. s. 87–116. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2004). Shared lives: Exploring practices of amity between grandmothers and grandchildren in western Kenya. Africa. ISSN 0001-9720. 74(1), s. 95–120. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Harris, S; Olsen, A; Oketch, H & Nielsen, BS [Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2002). Medicinal plants used by Luo mothers in Bondo District, Kenya. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. ISSN 0378-8741. 83, s. 39–54. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane; Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Nokes, K; Okatcha, F; Grigorenko, EL & Stenberg, RJ (2001). Knowledge of herbal and pharmaceutical medicines among Luo schoolchildren in western Kenya. Anthropology & Medicine. ISSN 1364-8470. 8(2/3), s. 211–135. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Grigorenko, EL; Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Okatcha, F; Nokes, K & Kenny, DA [Vis alle 8 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2001). The organisation of Luo conceptions of intelligence: a study of implicit theories in a Kenyan village. International Journal of Behavioral Development. ISSN 0165-0254. 25(4), s. 367–378. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Meinert, L; Nokes, K & Ouma, JH (2001). Self–treatment practices among Kenyan and Ugandan children and the need for medicinal education in school health programs. Health Policy and Planning. ISSN 0268-1080. 16(4), s. 361–372. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Sternberg, R; Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Nokes, K; Grigorenko, E & Bundy, DAP [Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2001). The relationship between academic and practical intelligence: a case study in Kenya. Intelligence. ISSN 0160-2896. 29(5), s. 401–418. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Aagaard-Hansen, J & Ouma, JH (2000). Kenyan schoolchildren’s self-treatment of common illnesses. Social Science and Medicine. ISSN 0277-9536. 50(18), s. 1771–1883. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane; Luoba, A; Adhiambo, P; NG'Uono, J & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (1999). Soil-eating is common among rural women in western Kenya. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. ISSN 0035-9203. 93, s. 515–516. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane; Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Levene, M; Mutemi, W; Beckerleg, S & Schulman, C (1999). Perceptions of soil eating and anaemia among pregnant Giriama women. Social Science and Medicine. ISSN 0277-9536. 48, s. 1069–1079. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane; Mutemi, W; Lowe, B; Friis, H & Schulman, C (1998). Geophagy and anaemia among pregnant women on the Kenyan coast. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. ISSN 0035-9203. 5(1), s. 549–553. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Prince, Ruth Jane (2019). Pandemic Publics: How Epidemics Transform Social and Political Collectives of Health, in "The Anthrpology of Epidemics", edited by by Ann H. Kelly, Frédéric Keck & Christos Lynteris. Routledge. ISBN 9781138616677. 182 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2018). Death, Detachment and Moral Dilemmas of Care in a Kenyan Hospital. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781119222293. 501 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa. James Currey Publishers. ISBN 9781847011398. 280 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Brown, Hannah (2016). Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa. James Currey Publishers. ISBN 9781847011398. 280 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Marsland, Rebecca (2013). Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives. Ohio University Press. ISBN 9780821420584. 260 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Marsland, Rebecca (2013). Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives. Ohio University Press. ISBN 9780821420584. 260 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2010). The Land is Dying. Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781845454814. 423 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, P. Wenzel (2010). ‘The Land is Dying’: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya. Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781845454814. 444 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Prince, Ruth Jane (2026). Cancer, health insurance and therapeutic (im)mobility in Kenya. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2026). Health Insurance and family care: Affective burdens of welfare reform in Kenya. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2026). Differential inclusion and partial protection: Kenya's welfare reforms. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2026). Remembering the Covid pandemic with state health workers in Kenya. doi: https:/www.med.uio.no/helsam/english/research/news-and-events/events/others/2026/living-through-epidemics.html. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2024). Mobilizing collectives of care amidst Kenya’s cancer epidemic. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2024). Cancer Care, Health Insurance,and Treatment Mobility in Kenya. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2024). “From Comfortable to Contrary: Environmental Science in Postcolonial Tanzania.”. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2024). Mobilizing Social Networks: therapy management groups and the burdens of care. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2024). Contrary science in a postcolonial research institute: The Tanzanian toxicologist Vera Ngowi and the Tropical Pesticide Research Institute in Arusha, from the present to the 1970s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Gateri, Alex Muriithi; Fjeld, Heidi; Prince, Ruth Jane & Lie, Anne Kveim (2024). Understanding antimicrobial use in livestock production to promote food safety and security: Ethnographic insights from rural Moshi, Tanzania. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Background: Livestock production contributes significantly to household income and direct food resources in Tanzania. This contribution is however threatened by food safety concerns occasioned by high use of antimicrobial agents. Consequently, there is a risk of contamination of animal products with antimicrobial residues. There is also a risk of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) circulating in humans, animals, and the environment through food and waste. It is thus imperative to optimize antimicrobial use (AMU) in livestock production. The roadmap to such optimization must bear research-based evidence on conditions of use. Purpose: Behavioral and knowledge deficit models have dominated AMU and AMR studies. This has (in)advertently precluded the influence of collective structures accounting for AMU. Using a One Health approach, we sought to describe the social, economic, and material conditions for AMU in livestock farming in rural Moshi, Tanzania. Methods: Data were collected qualitatively using an ethnographic approach between May 2022 and April 2023. Participant observation and repeated interviews were conducted with people who come into contact with and use antibiotics for animals. We followed veterinarians, smallholder farmers, and agrovet operators in their daily lives, conducting observations and informal interviews on how and why they use antibiotics. Field notes were used to document and organize data while constant comparative method was used to sort and organize data thematically. Findings: Facing existential disease risk, farmers use antibiotics for infection prevention and treatment in commercially driven intensive livestock production. Antibiotics come into use to support return on investment as farmers compensate for poor adoption of biosecurity protocols with antibiotic use. Based on economic interests, farmers find it difficult to adhere to withdrawal periods for animal products. Further, there is crossover use of human antibiotics in poultry as farmers strive for cost-effective production. The circulation and sale of antibiotics for veterinary use are not well regulated as various antimicrobial agents are handled and sold by informal vendors. Most agrovet operators dispensing animal medicines including antibiotics have not met threshold qualifications. Veterinarians report unending client pressure to use antibiotics for rapid production outcomes. Conclusion: Antimicrobial use in animals takes place in an inclusive infrastructural context, with a risk of contamination and resistance. Antimicrobials are seen as protectors of investments in intensive commercial livestock production settings. Available in loosely regulated markets, antimicrobials help compensate for low biosecurity adoption. Antimicrobial use and optimization need to be understood in this wider context to promote food safety and security.

• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2024). “Afterlives of chemical Insecticide control of malaria in Pare valley, Tanzania”. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2024). “Contrary Science: Toxicologists and Pesticide Politics in postcolonial Tanzania”. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2024). Tracing the metabolites of history: studying the toxic aftermath of the1950s Pare-Taveta malaria eradication experiment. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  What becomes visible when a collective of African and European social anthropologists and toxicologists searches for invisible chemical residuals of a malaria experiment conducted in a Tanzanian landscape 75 years ago? Tracing the metabolites of decaying organochloride pesticides – once deployed to solve Africa’s health and nutritional problems, today synonymous with colonial modernism’s ‘slow violence’ – revealed manifold forms in which scientific pasts persist in the present, exposed contemporary struggles about health and knowledge – and made us consider our place in both.

• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2024). Contrary science in a postcolonial African laboratory The Tanzanian toxicologist Vera Ngowi and the Tropical Pesticide Research Institute. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This paper explores the intertwined biographies of a Tanzanian toxicologist and pesticide expert, Dr Vera Ngowi (*1955), and the Tanzanian Pesticide Research Institute, TPRI, a formerly world-leading laboratory, located in Arusha, Tanzania. While both stories begin in the time of colonial occupation, our emphasis here is on the post-colonial period, after British institutional leadership had been ceded (1972), after the institute established toxicology and environmental pollution as new concerns (1974), and after Dr Ngowi started to work with the TPRI (1976). This period allows us to see both the promise and aspiration of an African science of protection, and to understand the challenges it faces. Our paper will chart the professional and political development of the scientist, including her achievements and setbacks, the evolution of her global scholarly networks and growing activism, and her maturing civic commitment and civil disobedience. Her biography also reveals the effects, on science, of dwindling resources, and of institutional and political obstruction. We will also follow the step-wise decline of her institution, the TPRI – driven by austerity policies, trade liberalisation and legal-political interventions. This decline affected laboratories, funding, and legal frameworks, and thus the possibilities of toxicological science in Tanzania, resulting in the progressive “unprotection” (Tousignant) of Tanzanian publics from toxic health risks. We conclude that toxicology is a “contrary science”. It arises in opposition to the threat of biocidal harm. But it also tends to resist the given social and political-economic status quo and inherent forms of “slow violence” (Nixon) – against human and non-human life-forms. As a result, it often finds itself at loggerheads with established scientific hierarchies and institutions. While we propose that a science of harm and protection should be contrary in order to gain insight and take effect, the histories of Dr Ngowi and the TPRI also reveal a crucial tension: while meaningful science of the toxic is inevitably contrary, to flourish and bear fruit, such science relies on stable institutional structures – the very structures that it must keep pushing against.

• Yusuf, Mariam Florence & Prince, Ruth Jane (2023). Implication of Introducing User fees in the healthcare system in Kenya and impact on COVID-19 Vaccination Fears: Experiences of Women in Khwisero Kenya. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Yusuf, Mariam Florence & Prince, Ruth Jane (2023). Relieving Stigma: Exploring the Impact of HIV-ARV stigmatization on COVID-19 vaccination uptake among women in Kisa West in Kenya. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Bannister, David; Muinde, Jacinta Victoria Syombua; Prince, Ruth Jane; Neumark, Tom & Wintrup, James (2023). The Public Good, Planning and Internationalism in African Health. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Muinde, Jacinta Victoria Syombua; Prince, Ruth Jane; Kroeker, Lena & Ameso, Edwin Ambani (2023). Creating futures: Revisiting (the transformation of) care networks in African countries. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2021). Covid-19, HIV and the Layers of African epidemy. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Geissler, Paul Wenzel (2020). Special issue editorial. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 36(6), s. 1–2. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12614. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Invisible and volatile, persistent and accumulating in the environment, toxic organic substances like Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are used in furniture and electrical appliances. They spread around the world through commodity production and consumption, second‐hand and waste trade, and air and sea currents, as well as in the bodies of migratory animals. Absorbed by and accumulated in living beings, they may interfere with metabolism and behaviour, and damage genetic material. Their flows connect British sofas to African recycling workshops to Chinese metal traders, and tropical waste dumps to arctic seabirds. They are the kind of material that the anthropology of the Anthropocene may attach itself to in seeking critical engagement with scientists, activists, regulators, and producers and consumers.

• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2020). Frontline: Primary Health Care and COVID-19 in Kenya. Somatosphere: Science, Medicine and Anthropology. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane (2020). Corona, how are you? Africa Is A Country (Blog). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). The Anthropology of Empire. I MacKenzie, John M. (Red.), Encyclopedia of Empire. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781118455074. doi: 10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe370. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Lynteris, Christos & Prince, Ruth Jane (2016). Anthropology and Medical Photography: Ethnographic, Critical and Comparative Perspectives. Visual Anthropology. ISSN 0894-9468. 29(2), s. 101–117. doi: 10.1080/08949468.2016.1131104. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane & Brown, Hannah (2016). The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa. I Prince, Ruth Jane (Red.), Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa.. James Currey Publishers. ISSN 9781847011398. s. 1–28. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Prince, Ruth Jane (2013). “Tarmacking” in the NGO economy: hopes, desires and trajectories of Kenyan youth. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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