Hannah Brown PhD

Research Fellow Anthropologies of African Biosciences

I am a Social Anthropologist with a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester (2010). I joined the school in 2010 as a post-doctoral fellow in Anthropology and a member of the Martin Okonji research group for Anthropologies of African Biosciences. 

Affiliation

Teaching

I teach as a lecturer and seminar leader on the Medical Anthropology and Public Health Module

Research

My research interests include gendered care work and domestic economies of care; nursing, hospital ethnography, health management, community health, Home-Based Care, HIV/AIDS and anti-retroviral therapy.  My regional expertise is in Western Kenya.  My PhD combined more traditional village-based fieldwork with institiutional ethnography.  Using the modality of 'care' as a theorectical device to think through divergent responses to HIV/AIDS, my PhD explored the intersection between domestic/familial practices and the globalised interventions of transnational biomedicine.  During my PhD I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in a district hospital, a community-based organisation and the homes of people living with and caring for others with HIV/AIDS.

My more recent work with health managers seeks to produce an ethnographic account of how low-level Ministry of Health management structures operate. In my current work I am interested in producing praxiographic accounts of goverment which approach a health system as a fluid, changing and dynamic set of relationships held together through what are sometimes precarious intersections between people, infrastructure, and material and organisational objects.

Research areas

  • Ethnography
  • Health services
  • Health systems
  • Health workers
  • Public health

Disciplines

  • Anthropology

Disease and Health Conditions

  • HIV/AIDS

Regions

  • Sub-Saharan Africa (all income levels)

Countries

  • Kenya

Other interests

  • East Africa
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