HIV and the Moral Economy of Survival in Kenya

This project, now completed, addressed the intersections of bodies, health, and illness with biomedicine, technology and government, focusing on large-scale health interventions in Kenya, East Africa. Located in the city of Kisumu, it explored the practices and negotiations of value that take shape around medical technologies, clinical care, disease and illness identities, welfare, scientific knowledge, and expertise, where providing health care and welfare is an experimental intervention organised largely outside the state. Ruth Prince investigated the implications of new medical technologies, expanding public engagements with science, and the intricacies of biomedical practices. She explored how these relate to moral economies of care, survival and hope, as well as to neoliberal governance and political economy. The study situated these issues within broader patterns in global health interventions and transnational forms of governance. The fieldwork was conducted in hospital wards, government clinics, NGOs, and donor-supported patient support centres as well as among residents of Kisumu city.
 

The research engages with recent literature on biosocialities by exploring how entanglements between viruses, people, and medical technologies are creating new social identities and forms of belonging, as well as raising questions about definitions of disease, normality, and well being in and outside of medical practice. As antiretroviral treatment programmes embody experimental sites in which development, global health, and humanitarian interventions converge, the project has also led to re-thinking the consequences of these mixed sites of healthcare, welfare, research, and intervention for the political landscape and the future of the state provision of health care in Kenya and East Africa more broadly.