Postdoctoral Research Associate

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology to work with Prof Hannah Brown on a project funded by the Wellcome Trust entitled ‘Understanding endemic Rift Valley Fever (RVF) transmission in distinct African regions’. This large, multi-disciplinary project brings together a team of researchers seeking to challenge the current view of RVFV as an epidemic disease. We propose that RVF exists along a spectrum from epidemic to endemic transmission, influenced by landscape ecology, climate, and socioeconomic factors.

The successful applicant will work closely with Prof Brown and support her leadership of the social science component of this project by undertaking a new piece of extended ethnographic fieldwork that will interrogate how social understanding and responses to RVF interface with an ep idemiological transition of RVF from a disease of concern only during epidemics to one experienced as an endemic disease.

The primary sites of ethnographic fieldwork will be in Kenya, in Isiolo (epidemic RVF) and Kajiado (endemic RVF) counties, with the possibility of shorter visits to project sites in South Africa and Senegal where other strands of the project are active. The aim of the social science work package is to generate a multidimensional understanding of multispecies relations, environments, livelihoods, politics, and public health priorities for RVF as interconnected elements of a biosocial nexus, and to work closely and collaboratively with other project members to ensure that these insights are fully integrated into the overall project and can be used to develop evidence-based strategies for sustainable RVFV control.

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