About
Branwyn Poleykett was a postdoctoral research associate on the Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic project. Branwyn left CRASSH in 2018, and is now working at the University of Exeter, in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. This profile is now archived.
I am a medical anthropologist specialising in the study of science, biomedicine and Global Health in sub-Saharan Africa. I have conducted ethnographic research with actors implicated in different ways in the Global Health project: commercial sex workers, front line health workers, laboratory scientists, and artists working on popular health murals. Across these projects I have developed new conceptual approaches to the study of Global Health, focusing on its origins in mid-twentieth century development theory, its distributions of power and expertise via transnational scientific pedagogy, and its visual politics.
My PhD examined the regulation of female commercial work in Dakar and the production of knowledge about instrumental intimacies and social, economic and bodily vulnerability. My doctoral research involved work on recruitment to transnational medical research and this stimulated my interest in the ethnographic study of sites of scientific research in Africa. I went on to develop this research programme as a postdoctoral fellow with the Anthropologies of African Biosciences group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge. Based on fieldwork in Tanzania, my project explored how capacities in science are gained, experienced, and lived through time, and how scientific values are imagined and re-made in contemporary East Africa in the era of Global Health.
I am currently writing a book about health communication in Dakar titled Lines of Sight: Development, Decolonisation and the Image World of Senegalese Hygiene. Lines of Sight draws upon ethnographic and archival work in Senegal and France and uses visual methodologies to explore how public health messages have been communicated in Senegal from 1950 to the present day. The archival chapters examine how successive persuasive political projects (rural animation, basic education, urbanization, modernisation and conversion) imagined the visual literacies required to engage with and enact their political goals. The book weaves ethnographic and historical data together, following youth political leaders, preachers and visual artists through the city and observing how didactic messages are constructed and how they create and organise new constituencies. Lines of Sight breaks new ground in medical anthropology highlighting the intersections of the subdiscipline with anthropologies of representation, visuality, creativity and communication.
I have recently begun to research diet and emergence and contemporary impact of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension in Dakar. This research uses ethnographic methods to better understand the overconsumption of salt, sugar and fat in a highly food insecure city.
Publications
Journal Articles
- Lynteris, Christos; and Poleykett, Branwyn. ‘The Anthropology of Epidemic Control: Technologies and Materialities.’ Medical Anthropology [accepted]
- Poleykett (2018) 'Ethnohistory and the Dead: Cultures of Colonial Epidemiology,' Medical Anthropology [Read]
- Poleykett (2018) ‘Made in Denmark: scientific mobilities and the place of pedagogy in Global Health,' Global Public Health [Read]
- Poleykett (2017) Pasteurian tropical medicine and colonial scientific vision, Subjectivity [Read]
- Poleykett (2016) Data, desire and recognition: Learning to identify a ‘prostitute’ in Dakar, Ethnography, published online first [Read]
- (with Peter Mangesho) (2016) Labour politics and Africanisation at a Tanzanian scientific research institute, 1949-1966, Africa, 86, 01: 142-161.
Edited Journal Issues
- Lynteris, Christos and Poleykett, Branwyn. (eds). 'Technologies and Materialities of Epidemic Control.' Medical Anthropology [in print]
Book chapters
- (Forthcoming) 'Une expérience ambigüe : catégorisations de la sexualité marchande et lutte contre le VIH/sida au Sénégal' in Christoque Broqua (Ed.) Lutter Contre le Sida en Afrique: Mobilisations locales et internationales au temps des antirétroviraux. Paris, Karthala
- Poleykett, Branwyn. ‘Public Culture and the Spectacle of Epidemic Disease in Rabat and Casablanca’. In Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson and Christos Lynteris (eds). Plague and the City. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.
- Poleykett, Branwyn. 'Molecular and Municipal Politics: Research and Regulation in Dakar' in Geissler, Paul Wenzel (Ed.) Para-States and Medical Science: Making African Global Health. Duke University Press, 2015.
Open access and online publishing
- Review of Terence E. McDonnell’s ‘Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unravelling of AIDS media in Ghana’, Medicine Anthropology Theory [Read]
- Building Out the Rat: Animal Intimacies and Prophylactic Settlement in 1920s South Africa, Anthropology and Environment Blog [Read]
- (with Lukas Engelmann and Nicholas H.A. Evans) (2015) Fragments of Plague, Limn Volume 6 [Read]
- Review of Yasmin Gunaratnam’s “Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care”, somatosphere.net [Read]
Book reviews
- Review of Hansjorg Dilger, Abdoulaye Kane and Stacey A. Langwick (Eds.) “Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89, 3
- Review of Peter Redfield “Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders” Social Anthropology 22, 2: 259-260.
- Review of Lynn M. Thomas and Jennifer Cole (Eds.) “Love in Africa” Gender, Place and Culture 17, 5: 673-4.
Talks and Papers
2017
- “Decolonising Health Communication: Image and Interpretation in Dakar”, Medical Anthropology Seminar London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 4 October
- “On Afrofuturism and Prospective Nostalgia”, ACASA Annual Conference 2017, 12 August
- “Lines of Sight: Visions of African Public Health” Global Health Histories Seminar, WHO Centre for Global Health Histories, University of York, 27 April
- “Debility, renewal, and the commodification of the lifecourse in Tanzanian scientific lives”, Biocircularities: Lives Times and Technologies CRASSH, University of Cambridge
2016
- “Colonial rituals of counting and containment”, Techniques, Technologies and Materialities of Epidemic Control, CRASSH, University of Cambridge , 9-11 September
- Race and Revelation: the dreams of Charles Nicolle and the Pasteurian order of things, Research, Reverie and the Wandering Imagination, University of Cambridge, 6 September
2015
- “Ritual, Hygiene and Ordinary Deaths: Burial in Colonial Madagascar” Corpses, Burials and Infection Cambridge, 4-5 December
- “Medical evidence in public”, Association of Social Anthropology Conference, Exeter University, April 19-22
2014
- “Unbuilding the city: plague in the Moroccan Villes Modernes”, Plague in the City: Disease, Epidemic Control and the Urban Environment CRASSH, Cambridge, December 5-6
- “Aesthetics and abjection in colonial orientalist medical photography” Shadowing the Scene: Negativity in Affect, Politics, Aesthetics Vilnius, Lithuania, September 27-28
