Mwenza Blell
Biographic Data
| ID | 117483 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mwenza Blell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mwenza |
| FAMILY NAME | Blell |
| SIGNATURE | BLELL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6794-3826 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 82 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Configuring Race, Racialization and Reproduction in the Nordic Context
Ghosts in the machine
We discuss reproductive justice in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state often considered as having achieved exceptionally high ethical standards in reproductive health and overall justice. Every now and then, however, this reproduction is interrupted by ghosts in the machine: the problems, past and present, of marginalised, racialised, and/or otherwise non-normative people whose presences provoke specific Finnish hauntings, seething pre…
Justice reproductive en Finlande ? Le mythe de l'homogénéité dans une social-démocratie nordique
Bien que la social-démocratie finlandaise soit fondée sur l'égalité sociale, la justice reproductive n'est toujours pas une réalité dans ce pays. Les causes de cet état de fait sont explorées à l'aide de deux ethnographies sur les technologies de procréation médicalement assistée et, plus spécifiquement, sur les manquements à l'égalité de traitement liés à la race, la classe, le genre et la sexualité. Les entretiens avec des chercheur·se·s et des…
On the Shoulders of Giants Or the Back of a Mule
Citational practices reflect values and valuation in academia. Far from being merely consciously or unconsciously political, they reflect academic "upbringing" in complex ways, and, although one may be unhappy at how they were raised, it still may not be clear how to live better. In this article, I highlight aspects of my upbringing in anthropology, noting how I was instructed in citational practice by senior anthropologists from biological and s…
Reproductive justice for the haunted Nordic welfare state
The Nordic welfare state aims to offer universal healthcare and achieve good health, bar none. We discuss past and present moral blind spots in welfare state bioethics through reproductive justice and queer bioethics, particularly focusing on race and racism, based on ethnographic data from Finland. Globally portrayed as aspirational and mostly uninterrogated, it is crucial to have a thorough bioethical evaluation of a Nordic model informed by Bl…
A one-sided view of the world’
Academic freedom is a necessary principle. Current attempts to (re)conceptualise, (re)frame, and reduce the principles of free speech from universal concepts to specific and narrow conceptions are however underpinned by political expediency and accompanied by erosions to press freedom and protest rights. The current enacting and policing of academic freedom is purposely acontextual, colour-blind, and ignorant of differential costs of dissent and …
Working in unprecedented times
The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities and inequities. Injustices within the labor market mean that the lives particularly of women of color have been negatively affected by the crisis in multiple ways. Guided by standpoint epistemology, we take an intersectional approach and use autoethnographic methods in which we draw on our personal experiences within the United Kingdom's higher education institutions during the p…
Truth from the machine
Critics now articulate their worries about the technologies, social practices and mythologies that comprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many domains. In this paper, we investigate the intersection of two domains of criticism: identity and scientific knowledge. On one hand, critics of AI in public policy emphasise its potential to discriminate on the basis of identity. On the other hand, critics of AI in scientific realms worry about how it ma…
Association of HIV status with sexual function in women aged 45–60 in England
Increasing numbers of women living with HIV are reaching their midlife. We explore the association of HIV status with sexual function (SF) in women aged 45–60 using two national cross-sectional surveys: the third British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (“Natsal-3”) and “PRIME”, a survey of women living with HIV attending HIV clinics across England. Both studies asked the same questions about SF that take account not only sexual…
Grandmother Hypothesis, Grandmother Effect, and Residence Patterns
The grandmother hypothesis is an adaptationist hypothesis suggesting the extended human female postmenopausal life span is explainable by kin selection. Grandmothers who provide alloparental care to their grandchildren are suggested to increase their fitness. Much research has focused on detecting grandmother effects in a range of settings worldwide. Evidence indicates that there may be differences in the effects of paternal and maternal grandpar…
Partible Paternity
Partible paternity is the idea that humans can have more than one biological father. Common in lowland South American societies, this understanding of the process of conception is one in which multiple inseminations are required to make a successful pregnancy and that multiple males can take part in this process. In some cases, social fatherhood is also assigned to multiple males. While many have suggested these beliefs must provide some evolutio…
British Pakistani Muslim Masculinity, (In)fertility, and the Clinical Encounter
The experiences of men facing fertility disruptions are understudied. For British Pakistanis, the impact of infertility is heightened for women because of normative pressures to bear children. But what of men? I present data from in-depth interviews in North East England with infertile British Pakistani Muslims and relevant health professionals. British Pakistani men's level of participation in clinical encounters and responses to diagnoses of ma…
"Anthropologists in Films
Drawing upon 53 films featuring fictional representations of anthropologists, we explore in this article the popular depiction and perception of anthropology by examining portrayals of the discipline in film. Finding that 26 of the 53 can be categorized as horror films, we examine the role of anthropologists in these films as experts and mediators for seemingly alien "others" and how this lends itself to frequently heroic depictions. We draw para…
Health impacts of pedestrian head-loading
Across sub-Saharan Africa, women and children play major roles as pedestrian load-transporters, in the widespread absence of basic sanitation services, electricity and affordable/reliable motorised transport. The majority of loads, including water and firewood for domestic purposes, are carried on the head. Load-carrying has implications not only for school attendance and performance, women's time budgets and gender relations, but arguably also f…
The interview as narrative ethnography
Acts of counter-subjectification in qualitative research are always present but are often submerged in accounts that seek to locate the power of subjectification entirely with the researcher. This is particularly so when talking to people about sensitive issues. Based on an interview-based study of infertility and reproductive disruption among British Pakistanis in Northeast England, we explore how we, as researchers, sought and were drawn into v…
Navigating New Socio-Demographic Landscapes
Everybody is moving on
It is now widely recognised that experiences of infertility are socially and culturally contingent. Drawing on reproductive narratives of 108 British-Pakistani Muslims living in Northeast England (collected from 2007 to 2010), we show that subjective experiences of infertility in this population can take many forms, from 'straightforward' childlessness to concerns about inability to fulfil a range of reproductive expectations, desires and obligat…
Obesity, Hypertension, and Migration
The effects of migration on human health have been a topic of interest for demographers and human biologists. Even if migrants to a new region achieve a higher standard of living in their new place of residence, their improved living conditions may not be associated with better health. Part of the difficulty of understanding the health consequences of migration is the complications in trying to control for variables that may affect health, such a…
Predictors of Age at Menarche in the Newcastle Thousand Families Study
Several studies have found relationships between early life factors (birth weight, length of gestation, height, weight, duration of breast-feeding, maternal age, social class, periods of infection, presence of adverse life events, and quality of housing conditions in childhood) and age at menarche but none has considered all of these factors in the same study. The follow-up study of the Newcastle Thousand Families birth cohort, established in 194…
Indentured migration and differential gender gene flow
After the emancipation of African slaves in the Caribbean, the labor void left by out‐migrating former slaves was filled by in‐migrating indentured servants from prepartition India and China. In some areas of the Caribbean such as Trinidad, Suriname, and Guyana, the East‐Indian migrants formed large communities. In this article, we report a study based on mtDNA and Y‐chromosomal markers of a small East‐Indian community from Limón, Costa Rica. The…
The East Indian Diaspora in Costa Rica
Anthropologists have long been interested in the survival of Indian cultural traits in the New World. In this article, we present results of an ongoing project with a Costa Rican community that descends from East Indian indentured servants. We focus on the group's marriage patterns and how these patterns might have helped keep the community as a cohesive ethnic group. We investigate the group's level of inbreeding by computing the inbreeding coef…
Validity of age at menarche self-reported in adulthood
Objective: To test the validity of age at menarche self-reported in adulthood and examine whether socioeconomic position, education, experience of gynaecological events and psychological symptoms influence the accuracy of recall. Design: Prospective birth cohort study. Setting: England, Scotland and Wales. Participants: 1050 women from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development, with two measures of age at menarche, on…
Validity of age at menarche self-reported in adulthood
Objective: To test the validity of age at menarche self-reported in adulthood and examine whether socioeconomic position, education, experience of gynaecological events and psychological symptoms influence the accuracy of recall. Design: Prospective birth cohort study. Setting: England, Scotland and Wales. Participants: 1050 women from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development, with two measures of age at menarche, on…
The interview as narrative ethnography
Acts of counter-subjectification in qualitative research are always present but are often submerged in accounts that seek to locate the power of subjectification entirely with the researcher. This is particularly so when talking to people about sensitive issues. Based on an interview-based study of infertility and reproductive disruption among British Pakistanis in Northeast England, we explore how we, as researchers, sought and were drawn into v…
Navigating New Socio-Demographic Landscapes
Everybody is moving on
It is now widely recognised that experiences of infertility are socially and culturally contingent. Drawing on reproductive narratives of 108 British-Pakistani Muslims living in Northeast England (collected from 2007 to 2010), we show that subjective experiences of infertility in this population can take many forms, from 'straightforward' childlessness to concerns about inability to fulfil a range of reproductive expectations, desires and obligat…
A one-sided view of the world’
Academic freedom is a necessary principle. Current attempts to (re)conceptualise, (re)frame, and reduce the principles of free speech from universal concepts to specific and narrow conceptions are however underpinned by political expediency and accompanied by erosions to press freedom and protest rights. The current enacting and policing of academic freedom is purposely acontextual, colour-blind, and ignorant of differential costs of dissent and …
Truth from the machine
Critics now articulate their worries about the technologies, social practices and mythologies that comprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many domains. In this paper, we investigate the intersection of two domains of criticism: identity and scientific knowledge. On one hand, critics of AI in public policy emphasise its potential to discriminate on the basis of identity. On the other hand, critics of AI in scientific realms worry about how it ma…
Working in unprecedented times
The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities and inequities. Injustices within the labor market mean that the lives particularly of women of color have been negatively affected by the crisis in multiple ways. Guided by standpoint epistemology, we take an intersectional approach and use autoethnographic methods in which we draw on our personal experiences within the United Kingdom's higher education institutions during the p…
"Anthropologists in Films
Drawing upon 53 films featuring fictional representations of anthropologists, we explore in this article the popular depiction and perception of anthropology by examining portrayals of the discipline in film. Finding that 26 of the 53 can be categorized as horror films, we examine the role of anthropologists in these films as experts and mediators for seemingly alien "others" and how this lends itself to frequently heroic depictions. We draw para…
On the Shoulders of Giants Or the Back of a Mule
Citational practices reflect values and valuation in academia. Far from being merely consciously or unconsciously political, they reflect academic "upbringing" in complex ways, and, although one may be unhappy at how they were raised, it still may not be clear how to live better. In this article, I highlight aspects of my upbringing in anthropology, noting how I was instructed in citational practice by senior anthropologists from biological and s…
The East Indian Diaspora in Costa Rica
Anthropologists have long been interested in the survival of Indian cultural traits in the New World. In this article, we present results of an ongoing project with a Costa Rican community that descends from East Indian indentured servants. We focus on the group's marriage patterns and how these patterns might have helped keep the community as a cohesive ethnic group. We investigate the group's level of inbreeding by computing the inbreeding coef…
Indentured migration and differential gender gene flow
After the emancipation of African slaves in the Caribbean, the labor void left by out‐migrating former slaves was filled by in‐migrating indentured servants from prepartition India and China. In some areas of the Caribbean such as Trinidad, Suriname, and Guyana, the East‐Indian migrants formed large communities. In this article, we report a study based on mtDNA and Y‐chromosomal markers of a small East‐Indian community from Limón, Costa Rica. The…
Obesity, Hypertension, and Migration
The effects of migration on human health have been a topic of interest for demographers and human biologists. Even if migrants to a new region achieve a higher standard of living in their new place of residence, their improved living conditions may not be associated with better health. Part of the difficulty of understanding the health consequences of migration is the complications in trying to control for variables that may affect health, such a…
British Pakistani Muslim Masculinity, (In)fertility, and the Clinical Encounter
The experiences of men facing fertility disruptions are understudied. For British Pakistanis, the impact of infertility is heightened for women because of normative pressures to bear children. But what of men? I present data from in-depth interviews in North East England with infertile British Pakistani Muslims and relevant health professionals. British Pakistani men's level of participation in clinical encounters and responses to diagnoses of ma…
Validity of age at menarche self-reported in adulthood
Objective: To test the validity of age at menarche self-reported in adulthood and examine whether socioeconomic position, education, experience of gynaecological events and psychological symptoms influence the accuracy of recall. Design: Prospective birth cohort study. Setting: England, Scotland and Wales. Participants: 1050 women from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development, with two measures of age at menarche, on…
Indentured migration and differential gender gene flow
After the emancipation of African slaves in the Caribbean, the labor void left by out‐migrating former slaves was filled by in‐migrating indentured servants from prepartition India and China. In some areas of the Caribbean such as Trinidad, Suriname, and Guyana, the East‐Indian migrants formed large communities. In this article, we report a study based on mtDNA and Y‐chromosomal markers of a small East‐Indian community from Limón, Costa Rica. The…
The East Indian Diaspora in Costa Rica
Anthropologists have long been interested in the survival of Indian cultural traits in the New World. In this article, we present results of an ongoing project with a Costa Rican community that descends from East Indian indentured servants. We focus on the group's marriage patterns and how these patterns might have helped keep the community as a cohesive ethnic group. We investigate the group's level of inbreeding by computing the inbreeding coef…
Predictors of Age at Menarche in the Newcastle Thousand Families Study
Several studies have found relationships between early life factors (birth weight, length of gestation, height, weight, duration of breast-feeding, maternal age, social class, periods of infection, presence of adverse life events, and quality of housing conditions in childhood) and age at menarche but none has considered all of these factors in the same study. The follow-up study of the Newcastle Thousand Families birth cohort, established in 194…
Obesity, Hypertension, and Migration
The effects of migration on human health have been a topic of interest for demographers and human biologists. Even if migrants to a new region achieve a higher standard of living in their new place of residence, their improved living conditions may not be associated with better health. Part of the difficulty of understanding the health consequences of migration is the complications in trying to control for variables that may affect health, such a…
The interview as narrative ethnography
Acts of counter-subjectification in qualitative research are always present but are often submerged in accounts that seek to locate the power of subjectification entirely with the researcher. This is particularly so when talking to people about sensitive issues. Based on an interview-based study of infertility and reproductive disruption among British Pakistanis in Northeast England, we explore how we, as researchers, sought and were drawn into v…
Navigating New Socio-Demographic Landscapes
Everybody is moving on
It is now widely recognised that experiences of infertility are socially and culturally contingent. Drawing on reproductive narratives of 108 British-Pakistani Muslims living in Northeast England (collected from 2007 to 2010), we show that subjective experiences of infertility in this population can take many forms, from 'straightforward' childlessness to concerns about inability to fulfil a range of reproductive expectations, desires and obligat…
Health impacts of pedestrian head-loading
Across sub-Saharan Africa, women and children play major roles as pedestrian load-transporters, in the widespread absence of basic sanitation services, electricity and affordable/reliable motorised transport. The majority of loads, including water and firewood for domestic purposes, are carried on the head. Load-carrying has implications not only for school attendance and performance, women's time budgets and gender relations, but arguably also f…
"Anthropologists in Films
Drawing upon 53 films featuring fictional representations of anthropologists, we explore in this article the popular depiction and perception of anthropology by examining portrayals of the discipline in film. Finding that 26 of the 53 can be categorized as horror films, we examine the role of anthropologists in these films as experts and mediators for seemingly alien "others" and how this lends itself to frequently heroic depictions. We draw para…
Grandmother Hypothesis, Grandmother Effect, and Residence Patterns
The grandmother hypothesis is an adaptationist hypothesis suggesting the extended human female postmenopausal life span is explainable by kin selection. Grandmothers who provide alloparental care to their grandchildren are suggested to increase their fitness. Much research has focused on detecting grandmother effects in a range of settings worldwide. Evidence indicates that there may be differences in the effects of paternal and maternal grandpar…
Partible Paternity
Partible paternity is the idea that humans can have more than one biological father. Common in lowland South American societies, this understanding of the process of conception is one in which multiple inseminations are required to make a successful pregnancy and that multiple males can take part in this process. In some cases, social fatherhood is also assigned to multiple males. While many have suggested these beliefs must provide some evolutio…
British Pakistani Muslim Masculinity, (In)fertility, and the Clinical Encounter
The experiences of men facing fertility disruptions are understudied. For British Pakistanis, the impact of infertility is heightened for women because of normative pressures to bear children. But what of men? I present data from in-depth interviews in North East England with infertile British Pakistani Muslims and relevant health professionals. British Pakistani men's level of participation in clinical encounters and responses to diagnoses of ma…
Association of HIV status with sexual function in women aged 45–60 in England
Increasing numbers of women living with HIV are reaching their midlife. We explore the association of HIV status with sexual function (SF) in women aged 45–60 using two national cross-sectional surveys: the third British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (“Natsal-3”) and “PRIME”, a survey of women living with HIV attending HIV clinics across England. Both studies asked the same questions about SF that take account not only sexual…
Truth from the machine
Critics now articulate their worries about the technologies, social practices and mythologies that comprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many domains. In this paper, we investigate the intersection of two domains of criticism: identity and scientific knowledge. On one hand, critics of AI in public policy emphasise its potential to discriminate on the basis of identity. On the other hand, critics of AI in scientific realms worry about how it ma…
Reproductive justice for the haunted Nordic welfare state
The Nordic welfare state aims to offer universal healthcare and achieve good health, bar none. We discuss past and present moral blind spots in welfare state bioethics through reproductive justice and queer bioethics, particularly focusing on race and racism, based on ethnographic data from Finland. Globally portrayed as aspirational and mostly uninterrogated, it is crucial to have a thorough bioethical evaluation of a Nordic model informed by Bl…
A one-sided view of the world’
Academic freedom is a necessary principle. Current attempts to (re)conceptualise, (re)frame, and reduce the principles of free speech from universal concepts to specific and narrow conceptions are however underpinned by political expediency and accompanied by erosions to press freedom and protest rights. The current enacting and policing of academic freedom is purposely acontextual, colour-blind, and ignorant of differential costs of dissent and …
Working in unprecedented times
The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities and inequities. Injustices within the labor market mean that the lives particularly of women of color have been negatively affected by the crisis in multiple ways. Guided by standpoint epistemology, we take an intersectional approach and use autoethnographic methods in which we draw on our personal experiences within the United Kingdom's higher education institutions during the p…
Justice reproductive en Finlande ? Le mythe de l'homogénéité dans une social-démocratie nordique
Bien que la social-démocratie finlandaise soit fondée sur l'égalité sociale, la justice reproductive n'est toujours pas une réalité dans ce pays. Les causes de cet état de fait sont explorées à l'aide de deux ethnographies sur les technologies de procréation médicalement assistée et, plus spécifiquement, sur les manquements à l'égalité de traitement liés à la race, la classe, le genre et la sexualité. Les entretiens avec des chercheur·se·s et des…
On the Shoulders of Giants Or the Back of a Mule
Citational practices reflect values and valuation in academia. Far from being merely consciously or unconsciously political, they reflect academic "upbringing" in complex ways, and, although one may be unhappy at how they were raised, it still may not be clear how to live better. In this article, I highlight aspects of my upbringing in anthropology, noting how I was instructed in citational practice by senior anthropologists from biological and s…
Ghosts in the machine
We discuss reproductive justice in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state often considered as having achieved exceptionally high ethical standards in reproductive health and overall justice. Every now and then, however, this reproduction is interrupted by ghosts in the machine: the problems, past and present, of marginalised, racialised, and/or otherwise non-normative people whose presences provoke specific Finnish hauntings, seething pre…
Configuring Race, Racialization and Reproduction in the Nordic Context
Sociology (16 works) · Demography (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Population (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Demography (5 works)