Living the Everyday
Health-seeking in times of sickness and epidemics at Uganda's borders
LSE Principal Investigtor: Tim Allen
Co-investigator: Grace Akello
Co-investigator: Georgina Pearson
Post-doctoral researcher: Liz Storer
Project associate: Jimmy Odaga
Living the Everyday principally addressed how social relations and everyday life affect knowledge and the management of sickness. The project contributed to policy approaches focused on containing epidemic diseases, including Ebola, across national borders.
How can we better understand health-seeking practices along the borders of Uganda-DRC and Uganda-South Sudan?
Based in the West Nile sub-region of Uganda, research was conducted on the borders of Uganda-Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda-South Sudan. These borders came to the attention of international experts, under the guise of Ebola-preparedness efforts, following the spread of the epidemic from North Kivu, DRC. Little was known about everyday social relations, movement and health-seeking in and across these spaces. In response, Living the Everyday employed the Institute’s extensive interdisciplinary expertise in the region, and developed new partnerships, to provide much needed perspectives on health-seeking.
Researchers
Tim Allen
Tim Allen is Director of the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and Professor of International Development at LSE.
Email: t.allen@lse.ac.uk
Grace Akello
Dr Grace Akello is a Visiting Professor at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and researcher at Gulu University. Grace focusses on how young people in complex emergencies and the context of HIV/AIDS prioritise and manage their health complaints.
Email: akellograce@hotmail.com
Georgina Pearson
Georgina was a research fellow on the LEAD Project and is a Clinical Lecturer in Public Health in the Population Health Research Institute at St George’s, University of London. She leads the project research on the Uganda-South Sudan border.
Email: g.f.pearson@lse.ac.uk
Dr Liz Storer
Dr Liz Storer led the project research on the Uganda-DRC border.
Email: E.Storer@lse.ac.uk
West Nile is an understudied and historically marginalised region in Northern Uganda, which has come under scrutiny following the Ebola outbreak in neighbouring North Kivu, DRC in 2018. This outbreak has implications for West Nile, due to the continual movement of goods, people and information across borders with the DRC and South Sudan. For public health response efforts, the everyday dynamics of these movements are highly important but little understood. Beyond official check-points, the borders are largely unpoliced, and before the 1950s they were mostly un-demarcated.
The research was hosted within LSE’s Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa in partnership with Gulu and Muni Universities in Uganda. The researchers used their extensive experience in the region to map health-seeking on borders to better inform public health responses to epidemic threats. The project began by targeting specific spaces to map how borderland collectives respond to such threats in the context of everyday life with reference to wider struggles with affliction and patterns of movement.
In the context of health-seeking in the region taking place at the intersection of biomedical, customary, and Christian ideas of healing, the project examined a) how people living directly on an unpoliced and demarcated national border formulate knowledge about the origins, cause and treatment of sicknesses, and b) how borderland locations affect care-seeking choices.
The research examined complex routes of medical therapy according to those who live at the borderlands and documents how the border affects plural health-seeking behaviours. Interdisciplinary in scope, the project adopted medical, anthropological, and geographical methods and theories to offer novel perspectives on health-seeking.
Principal project aims:
- To better understand health-seeking practices along the borders of Uganda-DRC and Uganda-South Sudan.
- To explore how knowledge is produced in relation to Ebola and other emergent afflictions, in relation to biomedicine and notions of intra-personal responsibility.
- To ground research in local conversations and processes of health-seeking.
- To locate present therapy-seeking within historical trajectories of border movements and flows of knowledge.
Journal papers
- Storer, E., Anguyo, I. & Odda, A. (2022). "One man’s meat is another man’s poison": Marungi and Realities of Resilience in North West Uganda, Civil Wars.
- Kirk, T., Green, D., Allen, T., Carayannis, T., Bazonzi, J., Ndala, J., Stys, P., Muzuri, P., Nyenyezi, A., Vlassenroot, K., Nyuon, A.D.A., Macdonald, A., Owor, A., Storer, L., Okello, J., Hopwood, J., Porter, H., Oryem, R., Parker, M. and Akello, G. (2021). Crisis responses, opportunity and public authority during Covid-19's first wave in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. Disasters.
- Leonardi, C., Storer, E. & Fisher, J. (2021). Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland. Political Geography. 90:102442.
- Storer, E. & Pearson, G. (2019), Cross-Border Dynamics and Healthcare in West Nile, Uganda, UNICEF, IDS & Anthrologica.
Working papers
- Aluma, C., Anguyo, I., Storer, E. & Pearson, G. (2022). Indigenous lockdowns: a historical exploration of epidemic containment in Arua District, West Nile sub-region, Uganda. 2022/1.
- Aluma, C., Anguyo, I., Storer, E. & Pearson, G. (2022). An enquiry into the use of Covid-19 herbal medicines in Uganda. 2022/2.
- Candia, E. & Kamurari, S. (2022). A retrospective assesment of Covid-19 viewed from Arua Regional Referral Hospital, West Nile Sub-Region, Uganda: Emmanuel Candia in conversation with Solomon Kamurari. 2022/3.
Blogs
- Perspectives from Uganda’s borders on containing COVID-19
- What are the effects of COVID-19 at Uganda’s border?
- ‘Only for African export’: understanding vaccine hesitancy in a Ugandan town
- In Uganda memories of Ebola spur resistance to COVID-19 public health efforts
- In times of COVID-19 Kampala has become ‘un-Ugandan’
- Do COVID-19 conspiracy theories challenge public health delivery?
- Better Health Interventions in Africa means understanding individual and communal practices of care
- Understanding how people think about COVID in Africa
- Social media and trust in strangers have grown Uganda’s market for COVID-19 treatments
The Centre for Public Authority and International Development explores how forms of public authority shape and are shaped by interlocking global challenges with risks and opportunities for development and inclusive growth.
Muni University is a degree-awarding institution licensed and supervised by the Uganda National Council for Higher Education, focussed on teaching, scholarship, research and innovation.
Gulu University provides skilled human resources in education, health, agriculture, technology, peace and security. A pillar of academic and sustainable development, it strives to transform communities and conserve biodiversity.
The British Academy's Knowledge Frontiers programme supports projects that engage with questions concerning the relationship between expertise, public understanding and policy delivery, highlighting the importance of collaboration.
Photo credit: UN Photo/Martine Perret