Event location
Seminars will take place at Seminar Room 218, FHH (Frederik Holsts hus), 12:15-13:30.
Zoom link for those wishing to attend online.
Abstract
In this talk, I discuss the frightening fluidity but intransigent status quo of the very journey of health intervention concerns of the women in Khwisero of western Kenya. Unlike many other scholarships on women reproductive narrative and their contribution to health intervention uptake, this study does not assume a linear path. Instead, it tells a story and travels with the bodies of women in Khwisero. It is the many new and old beginnings - continuities or temporal endings that we pay attention to. Through multiple reflection, and my positioning within the narrative, I come to gain access to the intimacy of the discourse. Infertility rumors remain an open-ended inquiry to be decoded in multiple ways. My study intention is neither to understand vaccination ‘infertility’ fears in its totality nor to ignore its presence, but to shed light on its temporal ambiguities, to understand its affective energies, and to track its divergent meanings and manifestations in approaching future health interventions for women in Khwisero of western Kenya or elsewhere. The understanding that it is difficult to follow the temporalities and future forms of women fertility concerns within health interventions is hard to escape. Indeed, the accounts given of the complexities taking place within the discourse points to a situation in which scientists and scholars alike seem at a loss to dissect or interpret the specificity of the issue. As Patrick Chabal (1996) writes, it is in such situations that “optimism is followed by despair”. With every new health intervention and reproduced fertility issue, scholarly explanations or interpretations are often invalidated or overtaken by emerging trends in time and space. It is these uncertain complex trends that my work on “REPRODUCTIVE FUTURE” thrives in as I show how such trends allow young women from Khwisero to weave and rework their health intervention seeking pathway. I wish to point out that although the study is situated within the framework of the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out in Kenya, the scope and magnitude of the focus stretch beyond the contemporary to include exploring the roll out of other health intervention such as HPV vaccines in the region. Covid-19 vaccination is approached not as a singular notion of understanding the re-emerging infertility fears and women's health-seeking patterns but on multiple interlinked facets that trigger the constant shifting perception and behavior of young women towards other health interventions engulfed in fertility controversies.
Bio
Mariam Yusuf is an exchange PhD student from the University of Nairobi in the project´Epidemic and African Health systems: Covid-19 in Kenya` funded by the Research Council of Norway (2021–2025) and in partnership with the university of Maseno and the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kenya; and the University of Cambridge, UK (Centre for the Study of Existential Risk). Mariam has MSC degree in Cultural Anthropology and Development studies from KU Leuven University attained in 2021 and funded by the VLIR-OUS Flemish Government scholarship.