Translating Kenyan Conservation to Texas
I spent part of the summer of 2025 in Kalama Conservancy, in northern Kenya’s Samburu County. The conservancy, part of the Gir Gir group ranch, covers 16,000 hectares…
Tag: Africa
Suburbanisation and the making of the African middle class
Claire Mercer‘s The Suburban Frontier examines African suburbanisation and the emergence of middle-class culture through a case study of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Drawing on ethnographic data col…
Responsible AI in Action: Beyond Policy Regimes
Work on Artificial Intelligence writ large has moved past laudatory excitement to one of vast critique. This recent scholarship has demonstrated the various racist and sexist biases embedded…
Political Stakes of Cancer Series – Episode 11: Selling Everything for Cancer Treatment: Access, Inequality and Patient Treatment Pathways in Kenya
Podcast with Ruth Prince, Professor of Medial Anthropology at the Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo, in conversation with Thandeka Cochrane, Postdoctoral Research Associate, King…
Political Stakes of Cancer Series – Episode 10: “Almost everyone has personal stories of liver cancer”: An account of the historical and contemporary world of liver cancer in Senegal
Noemi Tousignant, Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London, in conversation with Shagufta Bhangu, Lecturer in the Department of Global Health…
MAROONS – The Great Palmares
Written by Neil Turner The study of Maroon sites is a rich and virtually untapped area that can advance our …
Political Stakes of Cancer Series – Episode 7: Africanizing Oncology: Tales from the Uganda Cancer Institute
Podcast with Marissa Mika, writer and editor, in conversation with Thandeka Cochrane, Postdoctoral Research Associate, King’s College, London. In this episode we travel to Uganda to hear the…
Political Stakes of Cancer Podcast Series – Episode 2: We have to go so far – just for radiotherapy: therapeutic mobility, marginalisation and precarity for West African women with breast cancer in Mali and France
Podcast with Clémence Schantz, sociologist and midwife, Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) – Ceped UMR 196, in discussion with Thandeka Cochrane, Postdoctoral…
The hunter-gatherer society that shows us that sharing is the key to forest protection – our article!
Co-authored by my friend from the village, Felix Mangombe, our new article has just been published in the journal People and Nature after quite full on period of…
PhD done – read it here!
That’s right, after six and a half years of toil (and fun) spread between a rainforest in Cameroon and a library and office in London, the thing is…
¿PROHIBICIÓN DE LA ESCLAVITUD? EL AUGE DE LA TRATA DE ESCLAVOS EN EL SIGLO XVI
Read Time:11 Minute, 42 Second Hace unas semanas se estrenaba en RTVE, El mejor de la historia,un programa de entretenimiento en el qu…
Sudan: cessation of war appears long way off
Written by Jehron Muhammad “If this war (in Sudan) last for several years… the country that we knew as Sudan, …
The work of plants
Though plants are indispensable for human survival, their contributions to human existence and history are often underappreciated. To underline some of the contributions of plants to wider environmen…
Metabolism and capacity: history and labour in post-apartheid South Africa
I start with the question, why was it necessary, from 2008, for Mondi South Africa to spend R50 million (USD 8 million) a year on a nutrition intervention…
Miscommunicating metabolism: hunger, method and the practice of public health
Over the past five years I have been conducting research on everyday eating and the emergence of Non-Communicable Diseases in the West African city of Dakar, Senegal. Working…
‘How pesticides enter the body’: Porosity and growth in Western Kenya
Skin, nose, mouth In a remote church building in the Southwest of Kenya, Arthur Ouko was training farmers on ‘responsible use of pesticides.’ He was instilling the importance…
“When the city eats the forest”
Kinshasa, its traffic and street vendors, receded as we drove past the international airport on the national road following the Congo River. “It’s been recently re-asphalted”, said the…
Introduction: Metabolic thinking and the predicaments of growth in Africa
Metabolic thinking deals in bounded organisms, regulated systems, and the calculated (self)-optimisation of responsible, profitable, and healthful nutritive and energetic transactions. But critical s…
The toxic imperial metabolism of Senegalese peanuts
The identification of aflatoxin in the 1960s troubled plans for Senegalese peanuts. Blamed for the acute poisoning of English poultry fed with Brazilian peanut meal, this fungal metabolite…
Remembering my Friend, Véronique Amenan Akpoueh (d., Aug. 3, 2023)
Ours was not an ordinary friendship. Race, class, religion, citizenship, educational background, and (for fourteen years) parental status divided us. Language brought us together. Curiosity and inte…
27 words for elephant
In English, an elephant is an elephant. Ok, we have words for a group of elephants (a herd) and baby elephants (a calf), but these are general words…
How not to consult indigenous people
Like Canada, Brazil, the whole of Africa, and many other places in the world, Cameroon has the combination of indigenous people and a special fondness for big industry.…
What Happens if Chinese Smartphones Teach English Lessons in Tanzania?
English is the dominant global language of the world, it is the language of power, and control. But it is not the only language, and different people have…
Ranavalona I: la última reina de Madagascar
Read Time:5 Minute, 42 Second “Está muerto y desaparecido. A su cabeza un césped verde hierba, a sus talones una piedra” William…