Ruth J Prince
Biographic Data
| ID | 97639 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth J Prince |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth J |
| FAMILY NAME | Prince |
| SIGNATURE | PRINCE R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8717-9063 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 355 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
‘Corona is Over’
After what most Kenyans experienced as the "end of Covid" in 2021-22, material remains of anti-epidemic measures, biological traces such as long covid, and memories of deaths persisted. While infection itself left few visible material traces, paraphernalia of its control - masks, tests, handwashing stations, and routines - proved more durable, although often losing or changing their function and meaning. This paper examines Covid-19 residues in w…
Provincialising Global Oncology
Global Oncology is an important project and concept which has made significant strides in recent years
Confronting Failure and its Consequences in a Kenyan Public Hospital
In a health system shaped by decades of imposed austerity, operating with scarce resources and catering for citizens living in economic precarity and poverty, young doctors in a Kenyan public hospital found their everyday work frustrating and at times futile. Here I attend to situations that engulf a sense of personal integrity and morality, where opportunities, options and choices to develop other forms of meaningful practice remain limited. I e…
Vaccinations, Pills, and Resistance
In the shadow of HIV
Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic and related vaccine controversies. Focusing on the lives of young women living with HIV, the article traces how their experiences of navigating HIV care, stigma, and gendered expectations intersected with anxieties around COVID-19 vac…
Visions of Community Health and the Social Good in Kenya
In East Africa, social enterprises that fuse development work with entrepreneurial activities and a language of 'innovation' are becoming prominent. Critical of the NGO/donor model, which they hold as unsustainable, such organizations are funded by corporate investment and philanthropic capital but aim for self-reliance through enlisting local actors to market social services, while providing loans, digital infrastructures and training in entrepr…
The primacy of politics in neoliberal universal health coverage policy reform. A commentary on ‘financing and provision of healthcare for two billion people in low-income nations
Blurring ‘social justice’ with ‘market justice’ in recent experiments with healthcare and social protection in the Global South
Health for all? Pasts, presents and futures of aspirations for universal healthcare
In this special issue, we bring together anthropological and historical work that considers successive aspirations towards 'health for all': their pasts, their futures, and their diverse meanings and iterations. Across the world, hopes for providing 'health for all' were central to nation building in the long 20th century, and for international relations, particularly after the second world war and the establishment of the WHO. Health became seen…
Private health care, cancer, and the vulnerable middle class in Kenya
A novel terrain of health care is emerging in Kenya at the intersection of a cancer epidemic, expanding medical and health insurance markets, the continued evisceration of public health care, and a middle class that can raise funds from credit, loans, and social networks. As middle-class cancer patients and their families navigate these landscapes, they find themselves vulnerable both to the "ordinary crisis" of public health care undermined by a…
A new universalism? Universal health coverage and debates about rights, solidarity and inequality in Kenya
The rise of universal health coverage (UHC) as a global policy endorsed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) appears to signal new directions in global health as it introduces a progressive language of inclusion, solidarity and social justice and advocates the right of 'everyone' to access the healthcare they need 'without financial hardship'. Since 2018 the Kenyan government has attempted to widen access to healthcare by experimenting wit…
Beyond Failure
English Abstract: In a radical move that recalled the egalitarian promises of Kenya's post-independence years, the Kenyan government recently made all public healthcare free, for residents in four counties, for a period of one year. Drawing on ethnographic research on these ambitions for 'universal health coverage', this article follows civil servants tasked with the delivery of public services as they attempt to translate an experimental policy …
Curious Utopias
This special issue focuses on a trend that appears to run counter to the recent fascination with scaled-down solutions to world problems. From the predictive powers of Big Data in Kenya to market-driven humanitarian attempts to tackle the world's ills, dreams of massive biometric identification in India and visions of health care 'for all', we are seeing a return to ostensibly, sometimes self-avowedly, 'utopian' imaginations and schemes of econom…
Striking health workers
Precarity is increasingly a condition of life for Kenyan health workers as even professionals face costs of living and forms of debt that exceed their (unstable) salaries. Years of austerity and chronic scarcity have eroded healthcare infrastructures and rendered crises part of everyday work. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya from 2018 to 2020, we explore health workers' experiences and concerns about the precarity of their working conditi…
Digital Health in East Africa
Across East Africa, mobile phones and tablets are increasingly sitting in the hands of community health workers, clinicians, managers and patients. They are being used for a widening range of functions from diagnostics to health insurance to treatment advice, generating hopes for new healthcare futures and establishing the region as an emerging hub of experimentation in digital health. Drawing on our on‐going ethnographic and anthropological rese…
Cancer and contaminated food
During fieldwork on cancer in Kisumu, western Kenya, the author slowly began, like those around her, to ask questions about its location and its temporalities, its beginnings and endings, its boundaries and entanglements with toxicants. In this article, the author describes the landscapes of exposure that people in western Kenya associate with an increasingly visible cancer epidemic, including concerns based on partial and tentative knowledge abo…
Toxic worldings
In the course of recent world history, humans have permanently changed the chemical composition of the planet, as human-made chemical substances become part of the air, water and soil, pervading human and non-human bodies and upsetting linear imaginaries of past and future. The slow violence of toxic exposure associated with industrial activity and economic growth is a particularly insidious dimension of inequality and exploitation, woven into gl…
British sofas and global toxic flows
Invisible and volatile, persistent and accumulating in the environment, toxic organic substances like Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are used in furniture and electrical appliances. They spread around the world through commodity production and consumption, second-hand and waste trade, and air and sea currents, as well as in the bodies of migratory animals. Absorbed by and accumulated in living beings, they may interfere with metabolism an…
From Russia with love
In 1966, a new hospital was being built in western Kenya with Soviet aid. Designed by Soviet architects and planners, with equipment transported from the USSR, it was to be the largest hospital in Kenya. Still referred to today by Kenyans as 'Russia', it was the pet project of Oginga Odinga, the central figure of political opposition in postcolonial Kenya, who cultivated friendship with the USSR. Like the training offered to African students at t…
Jennifer Tappan, The Riddle of Malnutrition. The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda
The syndrome now known as severe acute malnutrition emerged as a focus of scientific research and medical interventions during the 1930s. It was first recognised, as a form of protein deficiency known as kwashiorkor, in the mid-twentieth century and was at the time a central international concern; it continues to be a serious threat to child health. Early twenty-first century estimates suggest that it affects 10–19 million children, over 500,000 …
Communities’ perceptions of factors contributing to child sexual abuse vulnerability in Kenya
Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a major global health concern. Although it is prevalent in Kenya, scant literature on factors contributing to CSA vulnerability exists. Using qualitative data from 28 focus groups and ethnographic field notes, we explored and assessed community perceptions of factors contributing to CSA vulnerability in Homa Bay County, Western Kenya. Findings suggest that people living in these communities perceived CSA as being influ…
Public Health and Global Interventions in Africa
The power to set agendas, priorities, and approaches lies largely in the hands of external donors, removing African governments from policy making in areas concerning the health-care needs of their citizens
Introduction
How are publics of protection and care defined in African cities today? The effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies on urban space are well documented. From London to São Paulo, denationalization, privatization, offshoring and cuts in state expenditure are creating enclaves and exclusions, resulting in fragmented, stratified social geographies (see Caldeira 2000; Ong 2006; Harvey 2006; Murray 2011). ‘Networked archipelagoes’, islands co…
Abstracts and Reviews
Tarmacking’ in the Millennium City
Over the past fifteen years, the city of Kisumu in western Kenya has emerged as an epicentre of ‘global health’ interventions, organized by non-governmental and transnational groups. These interventions involve concrete, practical engagements with the city's populations, but also imaginations and desires, as they intersect with residents’ expectations of development. This article follows the hopes, aspirations and trajectories of people who attac…
HIV and the Moral Economy of Survival in an East African City
Based on fieldwork in the city of Kisumu, Kenya, the article examines the survival of HIV-positive people on antiretroviral (ARV) medicines and situates this within broader moral economies of their lives-in matters of food, hunger, social relationships, and networks of care, including NGOs. Through locating survival at the level of individual adherence to medication, ARV programs medicalize it. Yet their focus on the intimate relation between med…
The Land Is Dying
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritua…
What Is Life Worth? Exploring Biomedical Interventions, Survival, and the Politics of Life
The land is dying
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritua…
Introduction to Special Issue
Introduction to Special Issue: Engaging Christianities:Negotiating HIV/AIDS, Health, and Social Relations in East and Southern Africa Ruth Prince (bio), Philippe Denis (bio), and Rijk van Dijk (bio) The purpose of this special issue1 is to explore and analyze the ways in which Christianity is becoming one of the most influential factors in the engagement of AIDS in some African countries. This special issue addresses the consequences of this rapi…
Tarmacking’ in the Millennium City
Over the past fifteen years, the city of Kisumu in western Kenya has emerged as an epicentre of ‘global health’ interventions, organized by non-governmental and transnational groups. These interventions involve concrete, practical engagements with the city's populations, but also imaginations and desires, as they intersect with residents’ expectations of development. This article follows the hopes, aspirations and trajectories of people who attac…
Children and medicines
Seeking Incorporation? Voluntary Labor and the Ambiguities of Work, Identity, and Social Value in Contemporary Kenya
This article seeks to understand why Kenyans have responded so enthusiastically to the recent push, by the government and NGOs, for voluntary labor within health and development projects and interventions. It argues that voluntary labor gains meaning and value in relation to broader economies of work and unemployment, to anxieties about identity, recognition, and belonging, and to aspirations for personal as well as national development. In the c…
Curious Utopias
This special issue focuses on a trend that appears to run counter to the recent fascination with scaled-down solutions to world problems. From the predictive powers of Big Data in Kenya to market-driven humanitarian attempts to tackle the world's ills, dreams of massive biometric identification in India and visions of health care 'for all', we are seeing a return to ostensibly, sometimes self-avowedly, 'utopian' imaginations and schemes of econom…
Shared Lives
This essay explores the relationships between three Luo grandmothers and their grandchildren with particular attention to forms of address and of sharing as practices of amity. Classic Africanist kinship studies identified these as central to the relations between alternate generations. We argue that they are also crucial to our understanding of some aspects of the notion of 'love' (hera)that old and young Luo describe as constitutive both of gra…
Knowledge of herbal and pharmaceutical medicines among Luo children in western Kenya
Primary school children aged between 10 and 15 years old in a rural community in western Kenya are frequently ill and have considerable knowledge of both herbal remedies and pharmaceuticals in treating common illnesses, such as headache, cold, fever, abdominal complaints and injuries. This paper explores this area of children's medical knowledge and practice, looking at children's ideas about and categorisation of illness and medicines, and their…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A new universalism? Universal health coverage and debates about rights, solidarity and inequality in Kenya
The rise of universal health coverage (UHC) as a global policy endorsed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) appears to signal new directions in global health as it introduces a progressive language of inclusion, solidarity and social justice and advocates the right of 'everyone' to access the healthcare they need 'without financial hardship'. Since 2018 the Kenyan government has attempted to widen access to healthcare by experimenting wit…
Beyond Failure
English Abstract: In a radical move that recalled the egalitarian promises of Kenya's post-independence years, the Kenyan government recently made all public healthcare free, for residents in four counties, for a period of one year. Drawing on ethnographic research on these ambitions for 'universal health coverage', this article follows civil servants tasked with the delivery of public services as they attempt to translate an experimental policy …
Toxic worldings
In the course of recent world history, humans have permanently changed the chemical composition of the planet, as human-made chemical substances become part of the air, water and soil, pervading human and non-human bodies and upsetting linear imaginaries of past and future. The slow violence of toxic exposure associated with industrial activity and economic growth is a particularly insidious dimension of inequality and exploitation, woven into gl…
From Russia with love
In 1966, a new hospital was being built in western Kenya with Soviet aid. Designed by Soviet architects and planners, with equipment transported from the USSR, it was to be the largest hospital in Kenya. Still referred to today by Kenyans as 'Russia', it was the pet project of Oginga Odinga, the central figure of political opposition in postcolonial Kenya, who cultivated friendship with the USSR. Like the training offered to African students at t…
"Becoming "One Who Treats
Using a case study of a healer and her grandson, this article shows how learning to heal is embedded in the close relationship of reciprocity and care between grandmother and grandchild in Luo society. Through shared daily life with his grandmother, the child develops social sense, respect, and compassion for people, as well as practical skills. By showing that learning to heal is not only embedded in everyday practice and in social relations, bu…
Perceptions of soil-eating and anaemia among pregnant women on the Kenyan coast
Health for all? Pasts, presents and futures of aspirations for universal healthcare
In this special issue, we bring together anthropological and historical work that considers successive aspirations towards 'health for all': their pasts, their futures, and their diverse meanings and iterations. Across the world, hopes for providing 'health for all' were central to nation building in the long 20th century, and for international relations, particularly after the second world war and the establishment of the WHO. Health became seen…
Active Compounds and Atoms of Society
This paper examines a sequence of investigations in parasitology, botany, pharmacology, psychometrics and ethnopsychology focused on Kenyan village children's knowledge of medicinal herbs. We follow this work of making and ordering of knowledge, showing that the different disciplinary perspectives on bodies, medicines, knowledges, children and cultures produced by this research all sought the foundation of knowledge in reference to objective real…
Salvation and Tradition
This paper explores the relationship between faith and AIDS in western Kenya by looking at two sets of beliefs and practices: Christian salvation and Luo traditionalism. Many of the debates and conflicts about AIDS and its meanings among Luo people are shaped by people's commitment to these very different faiths. While AIDS is exacerbating tensions between these ways of being and doing, the need to regenerate life and growth after death is also l…
Precarious Projects
This article explores the orientations of lay people in Kenya to science-specifically to biomedical knowledge about HIV--and their struggles to convert this knowledge into meaningful futures. In Kenya, the global response to the HIV-AIDS epidemic has resulted in a highly stratified landscape of intervention. Globally-funded treatment programs and clinical trials, focusing on HIV, channel transnational resources, expertise, and knowledge into spec…
Tarmacking' in the Millennium City
Over the past fifteen years, the city of Kisumu in western Kenya has emerged as an epicentre of 'global health' interventions, organized by non-governmental and transnational groups. These interventions involve concrete, practical engagements with the city's populations, but also imaginations and desires, as they intersect with residents' expectations of development. This article follows the hopes, aspirations and trajectories of people who attac…
Private health care, cancer, and the vulnerable middle class in Kenya
A novel terrain of health care is emerging in Kenya at the intersection of a cancer epidemic, expanding medical and health insurance markets, the continued evisceration of public health care, and a middle class that can raise funds from credit, loans, and social networks. As middle-class cancer patients and their families navigate these landscapes, they find themselves vulnerable both to the "ordinary crisis" of public health care undermined by a…
Anthropology and Medical Photography
The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, is a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography, as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlying this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology an…
Perceptions of soil-eating and anaemia among pregnant women on the Kenyan coast
Children and medicines
"Becoming "One Who Treats
Using a case study of a healer and her grandson, this article shows how learning to heal is embedded in the close relationship of reciprocity and care between grandmother and grandchild in Luo society. Through shared daily life with his grandmother, the child develops social sense, respect, and compassion for people, as well as practical skills. By showing that learning to heal is not only embedded in everyday practice and in social relations, bu…
Knowledge of herbal and pharmaceutical medicines among Luo children in western Kenya
Primary school children aged between 10 and 15 years old in a rural community in western Kenya are frequently ill and have considerable knowledge of both herbal remedies and pharmaceuticals in treating common illnesses, such as headache, cold, fever, abdominal complaints and injuries. This paper explores this area of children's medical knowledge and practice, looking at children's ideas about and categorisation of illness and medicines, and their…
Medicinal plants used by Luo mothers and children in Bondo district, Kenya
Shared Lives
This essay explores the relationships between three Luo grandmothers and their grandchildren with particular attention to forms of address and of sharing as practices of amity. Classic Africanist kinship studies identified these as central to the relations between alternate generations. We argue that they are also crucial to our understanding of some aspects of the notion of 'love' (hera)that old and young Luo describe as constitutive both of gra…
Salvation and Tradition
This paper explores the relationship between faith and AIDS in western Kenya by looking at two sets of beliefs and practices: Christian salvation and Luo traditionalism. Many of the debates and conflicts about AIDS and its meanings among Luo people are shaped by people's commitment to these very different faiths. While AIDS is exacerbating tensions between these ways of being and doing, the need to regenerate life and growth after death is also l…
Life Seen
This article is part of a project about transformations of relatedness among the Luo of western Kenya, which we examine by observing, in the everyday life of one village, concrete practices that constitute and negotiate material contact. In short, villagers understand physical touch and associated forms of material contact as practices that momentarily merge persons or their bodies by sharing substance. Such moments of merging release creative or…
Our son Obama
Writing from the city of Kisumu located 60 kilometres from the birthplace of Barack Obama's father, the authors describe the Obama-mania gripping Kenya and follow Kenyans' debates, both light-hearted and serious, concerning Obama's kinship ties to Kenya and the expectations these raise. They argue that Kenyan's hopes and fears surrounding the US elections should be understood in the context of the contested December 2007 Kenyan elections and the …
Active Compounds and Atoms of Society
This paper examines a sequence of investigations in parasitology, botany, pharmacology, psychometrics and ethnopsychology focused on Kenyan village children's knowledge of medicinal herbs. We follow this work of making and ordering of knowledge, showing that the different disciplinary perspectives on bodies, medicines, knowledges, children and cultures produced by this research all sought the foundation of knowledge in reference to objective real…
Introduction to Special Issue
Introduction to Special Issue: Engaging Christianities:Negotiating HIV/AIDS, Health, and Social Relations in East and Southern Africa Ruth Prince (bio), Philippe Denis (bio), and Rijk van Dijk (bio) The purpose of this special issue1 is to explore and analyze the ways in which Christianity is becoming one of the most influential factors in the engagement of AIDS in some African countries. This special issue addresses the consequences of this rapi…
Morality, Hope and Grief
The land is dying
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritua…
The Land Is Dying
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritua…
Science, knowledge and colonial rule in Africa
HIV and the Moral Economy of Survival in an East African City
Based on fieldwork in the city of Kisumu, Kenya, the article examines the survival of HIV-positive people on antiretroviral (ARV) medicines and situates this within broader moral economies of their lives-in matters of food, hunger, social relationships, and networks of care, including NGOs. Through locating survival at the level of individual adherence to medication, ARV programs medicalize it. Yet their focus on the intimate relation between med…
What Is Life Worth? Exploring Biomedical Interventions, Survival, and the Politics of Life
Introduction
How are publics of protection and care defined in African cities today? The effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies on urban space are well documented. From London to São Paulo, denationalization, privatization, offshoring and cuts in state expenditure are creating enclaves and exclusions, resulting in fragmented, stratified social geographies (see Caldeira 2000; Ong 2006; Harvey 2006; Murray 2011). ‘Networked archipelagoes’, islands co…
‘She's My Sister‐In‐Law, My Visitor, My Friend’ – Challenges of Staff Identity in Home Follow‐Up in an HIV Trial in W estern K enya
Identities ascribed to research staff in face‐to‐face encounters with participants have been raised as key ethical challenge in transnational health research. ‘Misattributed’ identities that do not just deviate from researchers' self‐image, but obscure unequivocal aspects of researcher identity – e.g. that they are researchers – are a case of such ethical problem. Yet, the reasonable expectation of unconcealed identity can conflict with another e…
Tarmacking' in the Millennium City
Over the past fifteen years, the city of Kisumu in western Kenya has emerged as an epicentre of 'global health' interventions, organized by non-governmental and transnational groups. These interventions involve concrete, practical engagements with the city's populations, but also imaginations and desires, as they intersect with residents' expectations of development. This article follows the hopes, aspirations and trajectories of people who attac…
In the shadowlands of global health
During the past decade, donor funding for health interventions in Kenya and other African countries has risen sharply. Focused on high-profile diseases such as HIV/AIDS, these funds create islands of intervention in a sea of under-resourced public health services. This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in HIV clinics and in a public hospital to examine how health workers experience and reflect upon the juxtaposition of 'global' medic…
Precarious Projects
This article explores the orientations of lay people in Kenya to science-specifically to biomedical knowledge about HIV--and their struggles to convert this knowledge into meaningful futures. In Kenya, the global response to the HIV-AIDS epidemic has resulted in a highly stratified landscape of intervention. Globally-funded treatment programs and clinical trials, focusing on HIV, channel transnational resources, expertise, and knowledge into spec…
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots
Journal Article Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa Get access Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. 300. $35/£24.50. ISBN 978 0 226 08602 6. Ruth J. Prince Ruth J. Prince University of Oslo [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medi…
Seeking Incorporation? Voluntary Labor and the Ambiguities of Work, Identity, and Social Value in Contemporary Kenya
This article seeks to understand why Kenyans have responded so enthusiastically to the recent push, by the government and NGOs, for voluntary labor within health and development projects and interventions. It argues that voluntary labor gains meaning and value in relation to broader economies of work and unemployment, to anxieties about identity, recognition, and belonging, and to aspirations for personal as well as national development. In the c…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political science (36 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Law (28 works) · Medicine (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (17 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Economic growth (12 works)