Research Team
Principal Investigator
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pretoria. She is based at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS). She is one of the founders of the Medical and Health Humanities Africa (MHHA) network. In her research, Nolwazi has been working with young people regarding issues of sexuality, sex education and sexual health intervention. In this work, her fieldwork sites span across Southern Africa including Botswana and Eswatini. She has collaborated with people in a range of disciplines including fine art, biomedical sciences, public health, demography and other social science disciplines. These collaborative projects include partners based in the global South, mainly in Ghana, Mozambique, Malawi, Kenya, Chile and India.
Co-Investigator
Deevia Bhana
Deevia Bhana is the DSI/NRF South African Research Chair in Gender and Childhood Sexuality at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her research focuses on building an interdisciplinary understanding of sexuality and gender across the young life course drawing from feminist, queer, critical masculinity studies and new feminist materialism. Her work on young sexualities, especially, but not only girls, places emphasis on the mechanisms through which gender inequalities are experienced and challenged in a variety of educational settings and within peer and relationship dynamics. She brings these insights to a wide range of questions that address the early experience of sexualities, sexual innocence, the intersection of young sexualities with age, race, class and social media, sexual health and education with special emphasis given to sexual violations and schooling.
In addressing an area of high significance, Deevia Bhana’s research brings a broad theoretical social science lens to the study of gender and childhood sexuality and contributes to this global field through her empirical material, theoretical reflection and development, and her positionality in South Africa.
Deevia Bhana is actively involved in supervising a large cohort of students and has a significant impact on building the research profile of the next generation of scholars in the field of gender and childhood sexualities. Deevia Bhana is an NRF B1-rated researcher.
Postdoctoral Research Fellows
Ghana
Saibu Mutaru
I am a Ghanaian social anthropologist and a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Ghana, a Master of Science in Africa and International Development from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in Social Anthropology from Stellenbosch University, where I was a Lisa Maskell Fellow from 2016 to 2018.
My research focuses on witchcraft beliefs and the controversial “witch camps” in northern Ghana, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Dagbambaland. In 2017, I won the Monica Wilson Prize for my paper on fieldwork ethics in communities where witchcraft is a significant factor. In August 2023, I was awarded the prestigious Evans-Pritchard Lectureship at the University of Oxford, a role I will hold until May 2024.
My teaching and research interests include witchcraft and magic, the anthropology of ageing, ethnography, kinship, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of religion and human rights.
mutaru80@yahoo.com
Kenya
Lilian Owoko
Lilian Owoko, a PhD holder in Anthropology from Maseno University, is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Since joining as a Graduate Assistant in 2008, she has developed expertise in social protection for older populations, gender and social inclusion, and adolescent sexuality.
Her doctoral research employed ethnography to examine socio-cultural and demographic factors influencing adherence to second-line ART among adolescents living with HIV in rural western Kenya. Owoko’s anthropological approach emphasizes contextualizing respondents’ experiences within their lived realities.
Currently, in the Re-imagining Reproduction project, she investigates how adolescent mothers—particularly those who became pregnant during the Covid-19 school closures—navigate returning to education while raising a child. The study explores how these young mothers reimagine their reproductive identities after experiencing societally disvalued pregnancies. Additionally, it examines the role of assistive reproductive technologies in either facilitating or hindering these re-imaginings in rural western Kenya.
lilian.owoko@up.ac.za
South Africa
Roselyn Kanyemba
Roselyn Kanyemba is a Social Anthropologist. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of KwaZulu Natal, an MSc in Development Studies from the National University of Science and Technology, and a BSc (Hons) in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of Zimbabwe. Areas of research interests include equal and quality education for females, decolonization of higher education spaces, sexual harassment, adolescent sexual and reproductive health rights, gender relations, adolescent HIV/AIDS and stigma, medication adherence and study of masculinities.
She approaches her work from an African feminist perspective. Her work centres on inquiry, questioning, dialoguing and transforming mindsets through research processes. Roselyn has significant experience working on collaborative studies with regional and international consultants and scholars. She has written extensively on adolescent sexual risk behaviours, sexist humour in a Higher education context, masculinities and HIV/AIDS, HIV stigma in adolescence and medication adherence. Her distinctive impact and contributions reflect in her works published in high-end journals such as AIDS and Behaviour, Frontiers in Public Health and Oriental Anthropologist, among others.
rkmaroses@gmail.com
Tanzania
Simon Mutebi
Dr. Simon Mutebi is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Dar Es Salaam (UDSM), Tanzania. He completed his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 2020. His PhD thesis was on subjective experiences and practices of sexual performance concerns among young men in urban Tanzania. He has published and done several presentations on gender, masculinity, sexuality and health. Dr. Mutebi’s current project explores men’s perspectives and experiences of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) in Tanzania. Specifically, the project is interested in answering the following questions: How do men’s ARTs shape the re-imaginings of reproduction abilities of men with infertility concerns? What ideals do men’s ARTs bring to men, and how do such ideals shape their re-imaginings of reproduction? How do men understand themselves as men or sexual men in the current context of ARTs? And finally, how do men’s understandings of the ideal sexual body shift with the advent of reproductive technologies in Tanzania?
mtbsmn@yahoo.com
Tanzania
Anitha Tingira
Anitha Tingira is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Dar es Salaam. She received her PhD from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University Berlin. She holds an MA (Sociology) and BA (Sociology) from the University of Dar es Salaam. Her area of interest is in sexual and reproductive health. She is also interested in the use of public health, insecticides, agrochemicals, and the future of human health.
For her doctoral degree, she researched the provision and uptake of maternal health services in central rural Tanzania, focusing on women and healthcare providers’ experiences, for which she received the outstanding dissertation award from the Association for African Studies in Germany in 2022. Currently, her research focuses on chronic gynaecological conditions, infertility and gendered trajectories of infertility treatment seeking. In the Re-imagining Reproduction project, she will research the experience of women and men in Tanzania in pursuit of making babies with the help of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and those who have been successful through the use of the treatment.
lkemianita@gmail.com
Zimbabwe
Tariro Moyana-Mukwidigwi
Dr. Tariro Moyana-Mukwidigwi is an anthropologist and lecturer at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of KwaZulu Natal and specializes in the intersections of anthropology, health, and spatial humanities. Her research explores gender, socio-cultural dimensions of health, women’s health experiences, and spatial justice within diverse cultural contexts.
At NUST, Dr. Moyana-Mukwidigwi teaches social and behavioural sciences, with a focus on reproductive health, cultural determinants of health, and disease aetiology in African settings. She has published research papers and contributed to interdisciplinary projects in spatial humanities.
Beyond academia, she is committed to fostering inclusivity in research and scholarship. She advocates for diverse representation, supporting underrepresented scholars and promoting cultural perspectives in research methodologies. Through her work, she aims to drive positive societal change by challenging existing perceptions and structures in health and anthropology.
tariemukwidigwi@gmail.com
Research Associates
Benson Mulemi
Benson A. Mulemi is an Associate Professor of Anthropology from Kenya. He is a research associate at the Centre for Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria and a fellow in the 2023 Leeds University Center African Studies/Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute virtual Fellowship.
He serves as a visiting professor/lecturer in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at the South Eastern Kenya University and at the Department of Mental Health, Gulu University; Northern Uganda. He holds a PhD degree in Social Sciences with a concentration in Medical Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
His research interests include maternal and reproductive health in Kenya, anthropology of cancer, hospital ethnography and culture and disability. Mulemi’s publications include contributions to: The Encyclopaedia of Psychology and Religion; African Folklore: An Encyclopaedia; Encyclopaedia of African Thought; Chapters in edited book volumes, including: Pursuing Justice in Africa: Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices; Anthropologies of Cancer in a Transnational Worlds; African Medical Pluralism; Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa; and Human Enhancement Debate and Disability.
Affiliated Researchers
Nirvana Pillay
Nirvana Pillay is an independent public health and development research consultant at the Sarraounia Public Health Trust. She holds a visiting researcher position at the Wits School of Public Health. Her focus is on research, communication, capacity development, and translating research for policy and practice. Her research interests include the health and wellbeing of young people, adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights, maternal and child health, and the health of farm workers.
She completed her PhD in Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand (2019). Her doctoral study was based in Alexandra, Johannesburg, and draws on medical anthropology, sociology and public health to explore issues of agency and decision-making for young mothers aged 18 to 20. Her dissertation interrogates how discourses of early motherhood mediate young women’s experiences following an early, unplanned pregnancy, and elaborates on how young mothers navigate their social and structural contexts.