Professor Ruth Prince

Ruth Prince is an anthropologist whose recent research in east Africa focuses on a) global health and biomedicine, kinship and care, citizenship and the state, and b) agrochemicals, environmental health and protection. Ruth is professor of medical anthropology at the University of Oslo. Trained at the universities of Copenhagen, UCL and Oxford, she joined Oslo after a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship and Smuts fellowship at the University of Cambridge.

Ruth has conducted extended ethnographic research in Kenya and Tanzania. She recently completed an ERC-funded project, ‘Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa’, studying relations between healthcare, welfare, the state, citizenship and the family, and following state-led attempts to expand social protections and access to healthcare. Defined by the WHO as ensuring that “everyone can use the health services they need without financial hardship”, moves towards universal health coverage are important in Africa, where structural-adjustment policies undermined state capacity, promoted privatization and pushed the burden of payment onto the poor, while 21st century ‘global health’ interventions did little to address the neglect of public healthcare. Historically however, African states have only partially pursued the public good, while in practice, social protection reforms such as UHC are both ‘thin’ and fragmented and are surrounded by conflicting interests.

Ruth’s research has followed the Kenyan state’s experiments with expanding health insurance and social protection, and the relations between these reforms and the informal social solidarity networks people are embedded in, navigate and pursue as they try to access healthcare. Ruth has also conducted extensive ethnographic research on Kenya’s cancer epidemic, following patients and their families alongside healthcare workers in poorly-resourced public hospitals and clinics and as they navigate Kenya’s highly profitable private healthcare sector. The monograph she is working on during her fellowship at Clare Hall and CRASSH brings these two pieces of research together.

Together with Wenzel Geissler and Noemi Tousignant, Ruth is also working on an edited volume on the afterlives of biopolitical interventions in postcolonial Africa, and writing up (with Anitha Tingira and Caroline Meier zu Biesen) recent collaborative research on pesticides, science, and protection in East Africa.

At Clare Hall, Ruth is accompanied by her husband, Wenzel Geissler, Professor of anthropology at the University of Oslo and former Visiting Fellow, with an interest in ‘past futures’ of scientific institutions in Africa, and in environmental health, particularly pesticides, science, and protection in East Africa.