Our research acknowledges the coexistence of biomedical vernaculars of health within pluralising landscapes of health and healing.
We are invested in tracing how health is understood across different environments, and how social, cultural, and cosmological concepts carry alternative dreams and logics of wellness and vitality. These perspectives frequently transcend individuated health trajectories and blur distinctions between mind/body and human/nature. Our research equally explores how idioms of healing and trauma intersect with Global Health policies and programmes.
Stephen Taylor’s research, focusing on the political and institutional geographies of mental health knowledges and practices in Kinshasa, has produced recommendations for responding to the pluralising and de-institutionalising landscapes of psychiatric treatment and care in the city. Likewise, his award-winning ethnographic research in eastern DRC has explored how multiple versions of ‘trauma’ uneasily co-exist in the region and confound the efforts of international actors seeking to explain and summate the incidence of psychological trauma.
Mental health has also featured in Tim Brown’s work on undernutrition and childhood development in rural and urban parts of Zimbabwe. Working in an interdisciplinary team, Tim, Kavita Datta and a small team of Zimbabwean social scientists were interested to understand how the experience of common mental ill health, referred to locally by Shona speaking people as kufungisisa, affected mother’s caregiving capabilities. In wide-ranging qualitative research, mothers and other primary caregivers talked about their experiences of mental ill-health, its causes, and how it affected their own and their children’s lives. In their analyses of the interviews, Tim and his colleagues drew on Robert Nixon’s conceptualisation of slow violence to connect the women’s accounts with the longer histories of colonialism that continues to shape their lives.
Moving beyond mind-body dualisms, Elizabeth Storer’s research in West Nile, Uganda, charts how healing cosmologies, which centre bodily vitality within a relational web of socio-political relations, provide an alternate and embedded reading of accumulated harm. Her ongoing work focuses on historicising human/ non-human entanglements to explore how health is structured amidst ongoing processes of coloniality.