About
Areas of focus
- Health and Welfare Financing, Social and Financial Protection
- Universal Health Coverage
- Health Insurance
- Social Assistance Interventions (eg Cash Transfers)
- Crowdfunding
- Humanitarianism
- Health Systems
- Epidemics (Covid-19, HIV/AIDS, Cancer)
- Formal and Informal Networks of Care
- Digital Health Technologies
- Community Health Work
- Mental Health
- Gender and Kinship Studies
- Kenya; Africa
Victoria has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork on Kenya's universal health coverage (UHC), national health insurance, cash transfer schemes (CTs), informal networks of care, gender and matrilineal kinship at the Kenya's south coast. She is currently developing a co-authored book on the anthropology of health insurance and a special issue on networks of care and their futures.
Victoria is working on her first monograph titled ' Economies of Care: Women, Cash Transfers and Matrilineal Relations in Kenya South Coast', based on her PhD research (as a Commonwealth Scholar) at the University of Cambridge. The book manuscript is an ethnographic account of the interaction of a social assistance intervention (the cash transfer scheme) with care, disease (HIV/AIDS), matrilineal kinship and gender relations in an Islamic context in the Kenya South Coast. It documents how these inform women's economic lives and their narratives of ill health, impact on gender relations and contribute to kin-making relations. Her doctoral research has been awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's Sutasoma Award and The Audrey Richards Prize by the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK).
Victoria was recently a researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology and is part of the "Epidemics and African Health Systems: Covid-19 in Kenya" funded by the Research Council of Norway. Within this project, she explores ethnographically how rural and urban communities in Western Kenya experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, and the afterlives of the pandemic. Victoria is interested in the speed with which the COVID-19 pandemic has entered its 'aftertime'. She examines what covid-19 measures, including its associated objects, are doing in the post-covid present, and what their meanings and uses might be (if any). She also investigates community health work during the pandemic. Victoria is a UiO co-partner in the ARUA (Africa) - Guild (Europe) research collaboration within the Cluster of Excellence (CoRE) on Preparedness and Response to Pandemics and Shocks.
As a post-doctoral research fellow, based at the Institute of Health and Society , Victoria worked within the European Research Council funded project titled "Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa: An Anthropological Study" .Her research focuses on the intersection of the Kenya government's financial and social protection/welfare projects, specifically national health insurance and cash transfers implemented recently by the government of Kenya. She also examines informal networks of care and non-state welfare and healthcare interventions, and how these contribute to the ways welfare and healthcare are engaged, assumed, embodied and contested in the local context.
She has previously investigated the history of poverty interventions and the emergence of cash transfer schemes as a new welfare intervention in Kenya. Victoria has also worked with various local and international organizations in applied and policy work on health and poverty interventions, HIV/AIDS and social protection.
Teaching
INTHE4113 – Introduction to Medical Anthropology
HELSEF4410 Introduction to Qualitative Methods
MED5600 Medical Studies Module 6
MED5700 Medical Studies, Module 7
Student Supervisions
Background
- PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
- MPhil in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
- BA in Anthropology, Maseno University, Kenya
Awards
- Royal Anthropological Institute's Sutasoma Award for outstanding PhD research (2018)
- The Audrey Richards Prize 2020 by the ASAUK (African Studies Association of the UK) for the best PhD dissertation in African Studies
- Commonwealth Scholarship
Selected Publications
Articles, Book Reviews and Book Chapters
2023. 'The 'Hustler' Fund: Kenya's Approach to National Transformation', African Arguments, https://africanarguments.org/2023/01/the-hustler-fund-kenyas-approach-to-national-transformation/
2023. 'Health for All? Pasts, Presents and Futures of Aspirations for Universal Healthcare'. With Ruth Prince and Janina Kehr. Social Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115660 .
2022. 'A new universalism? Universal health coverage and debates about rights, solidarity and inequality in Kenya'. With Ruth Prince. Social Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115258
2022. Simukai Chigudu, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, crisis and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Africa, 92 (3), 386-387. doi:10.1017/S0001972022000146 (Book Review).
2020. 'Health Insurance for the poor: Insights from the Kenyan Coast.' Somatosphere . Available at: http://somatosphere.net/2020/health-insurance-poor-kenya.html/
2018. 'Winning women's hearts: women, patriarchy and electoral politics in Kenya's South Coast' in Nanjala Nyabola and Marie-Emanuelle Pommerolle (eds) Where women are: gender & the 2017 Kenyan elections. Nairobi: Twaweza Communications, pp.152-189.
2017. 'Digo women, patriarchy and elections in the Kenya South Coast.' Gender Forum , Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Available at: https://ke.boell.org/en/2017/08/29/digo-women-patriarchy-and-elections-kenya-south-coast
Under Review
'Pains and Energies: Women, cash transfers and the moral economy of care in Kenya's south coast'. Medical Anthropology Quarterly .
Books
Economies of Care: Women, Cash Transfers and Matrilineal Relations in Kenya South Coast. (in preparation)
Editorial Work
2023. 'Health for All? Pasts, Presents and Futures of Aspirations for Universal Healthcare.' (Special Issue) With Ruth Prince and Janina Kehr. Social Sciences and Medicine.