Everyday life in a site of transnational medical research in Western Kenya: an ethnographic study

This thesis is about life in Luoland, Western Kenya, which, like other places in Africa, has experienced the profound impact of large-scale biomedical research programmes, intertwined with much larger transnational HIV/AIDS interventions. My aim was to explore the lived experience of being within intensive sites of medical research and intervention: what this looks and feels like to residents, and how transnational medical research is understood in relation to their broader, multi-sided lives. It is grounded in two periods of intertwining ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted between 2008-12 with people living around two places associated with a major transnational biomedical research station, headquartered on the outskirts of Kisumu City: a HIV research clinic in the city-centre; and the station’s oldest fieldsite, a long-standing Health and Demographic Surveillance System site in a rural location. Ethnography was based in the city in 2008-09 (22 months) and in the rural location in 2010-2012 (17 months). I used multiple qualitative tools – including observation, embodied and experiential learning, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and visual methods - to follow how the stories of people living their lives in these spaces unfolded over time. Empirical findings add to regional ethnography of JoLuo. They also add to the literature on anthropology of transnational biomedical research by underscoring a recognition that the ‘research communities’ that converge around research activity are not first and foremost defined by research. Instead, the stories of individuals and communities presented in this thesis reveal how research is folded into, understood through, and supported by existing relationships, biographies, and histories. They also show that lines between ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’ can be blurry. Further, theoretical findings add to literature on precarity, especially in contexts of extreme health and economic vulnerabilities, by showing that transnational medical research can be both a contributor to precarity, and a resource creatively used by its participants to navigate through it. My work also demonstrated that precarity can be experienced as having elements of predictability.