Activities

Special issue preparation workshop, Finse, Norway, 22rd-28th August 2026

(hosted by the Epidemic Traces and Epidemics and African Health Systems: Covid-19 in Kenya projects)

Our 5-day workshop in the Norwegian mountain retreat of Finse will have all project participants and advisers discuss pre-circulated papers on the afterlives of biopolitical interventions including anti-pandemic measures in Africa. While all papers will straddle the gap between past and present, and history and anthropology, and narrow down on particular sites or materials, the emphasis of all contributions will be on “life”, that is the continuous liveliness, generativity and mutability of material remains, and on their emerging futures, rather than their historical origins and past meanings.

LIFE AFTER workshop, Finse, Norway, 22rd-28th August 2026

Special issue preparation workshop, Finse, Norway, 22rd-28th August 2026

(arranged by the projects Epidemic Traces and

Epidemics and African Health Systems: Covid-19 in Kenya)

PROGRAMME

Thursday August 20th

20.23 Arrival Tousignant, Prince, Geissler to Finse (no catering)

Friday August 21st

9.00-17.00 Preparation of workshop programme, reviews and comments

(Tousignant, Geissler & Prince) (no catering)

Saturday August 22nd: Arrivals

9.00-16.00 Preparation of workshop programme, reviews and comments (Tousignant, Geissler & Prince) (no catering)

18.42 Arrival of participants & settling into accommodation

19.30 Welcome by EpiTraces and Covid-Kenya projects (Prince & Geissler)

20.00 Dinner (Steinboligen)

Sunday August 23rd: Pre-workshop Day

8.00-9.30 Breakfast, followed by round of introductions (Steinboligen)

9.30-12.30 Walk & talk (come for breakfast ready to walk, as we leave at once)

13.00-14.00 Lunch (Steinboligen)

14.00-16.30 Reading and writing/preparation time (in your flats/rooms)

16.30-17.00 Tea and cake (Steinboligen)

17.00-18.30 Workshop preview: programme, themes, issue plans & practicalities

19.00-20.00 Welcome drinks (Steinboligen)

20.00 Dinner (Steinboligen)

Monday August 24th: Workshop Day 1

8.00-9.30 Breakfast - talk on Biopolitics (and -science) in Africa (Vaughan)

9.30-11.00 Biruk, Tousignant (1st paper 9.30-10.15, 2nd paper 10.15-11.00)

11.00-11.30 Tea with some sustenance

11.30-13.00 Madhuku, Graboyes (1st 11.30-12.15, 2nd 12.15-13.00)

13.00-16.00 *Walk & talk in 4 groups (Theme: Biopolitics and science)

(packed lunch)

16.00-17.00 Tea and cake (reflection on conversations)

17.00-19.00 Rest

19.00 Dinner

Tuesday August 25th: Workshop Day 2

8.00-9.30 Breakfast - talk on Biopolitical remains (Geissler)

9.30-11.00 Prince/Geissler, Ciribassi (1st 9.30-10.15, 2nd 10.15-11.00)

11.00-11.30 Tea

11.30-13.00 Kopf, Manton (1st 11.30-12.15, 2nd 12.15-13.00)

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.30-16.30 *Walk & talk (Theme: Persist, endure, dissolve, morph, sediment, return..)

16.30-17.30 Tea and cake (reflection on conversations)

17.30-19.30 Rest

19.30 Dinner

Wednesday August 26th: Workshop Day 3

8.00-9.30 Breakfast - talk on Afterlife (Prince & Ciribassi)

9.30-11.00 Thiongane, Yusuf (1st 9.00-9.45, 2nd 9.45-10.30)

11.00-11.30 Tea

11.30-13.00 Hane, Lachenal (1st 11.00-11.45, 2nd 11.45-12.30)

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.30-16.30 *Walk & talk (Theme: Living after)

16.30-17.30 Tea and cake

17.30-19.30 Rest

19.30 Dinner

Thursday August 27th: Workshop Day 4

8.00-9.30 Breakfast – talk on Histories of science (Noemi)

9.30-12.30 *Walk & talk (Theme: synchronicity/diacronicity/memory/ethnography))

12.30-13.30 Lunch

14.00-15.30 David, Roth & Mitman (1st paper 11.00-11.45, 2nd paper 11.45-12.30)

15.30-16.00 Tea and cake

16.00-17.30 Ayodele, Manamere, Mutalemwa 30 min each

18.00-19.00 Farewell drinks

19.00 Dinner

Friday August 28th: Departure

7.00 Breakfast

8.38 Train for Oslo for most participants (some leave later for Bergen)

Workshop practicals:

All meals and plenary sessions will be in Steinboligen.

All reading, resting, in-between time will be in your flats, to create some calm.

Please come for meals on time. The cook works to time. We continue right afterwards.

Walks will be in 4 set groups (will be assigned).

In case of extremely bad weather, groups can meet in one flat each.

*For those who prefer an alternative to walking: we organize one group.

Organization of morning sessions (discussing the papers):

• 5-10 min pitch by author; 5-10 min per discussant; 10 min open discussion

(35-45 mins max for each paper).

• Each paper has been assigned to:

3 discussants, who prepare comments (in writing) and discuss them in the plenary (1 person to take notes during the discussion, to assist the author).

Guidelines for discussants:

Discussants are requested to read and review their 3 assigned papers closely and:

• Prepare a 5-10 minute commentary that may include questions to the authors

• Write a written manuscript review to support the author to bring out the shared themes of ‘biopolitical remains and afterlives’, to create links between papers, and to strengthen history/anthropology interdisciplinarity (literature recommendations welcome)

All participants will read all papers, and read their 3 assigned papers closely – thank you!

Participants (alphabetical, present/online)(discussants in brackets):

Mathew Ayodele (abstract) (Cal Biruk, Noemi Tousignant & Gregg Mitman)

David Bannister*

Cal Biruk (paper) (Noemi Tousignant, Megan Vaughan & Rebekah Ciribassi)

Rebekah Ciribassi (paper) (Emma Roth, Oumy Thiongane & Cal Biruk)

Pierre-Marie David (paper) (Oumy Thiongane, Melissa Graboyes & Wenzel Geissler)

Melissa Graboyes (paper) (John Manton, Mariam Yusuf & Wenzel Geissler)

Fatoumata Hane (paper) (John Manton, Noemi Tousignant & Guillaume Lachenal)

Charline Kopf (paper) (Fatoumata Hane, Noemi Tousignant & Mariam Yusuf)

Guillaume Lachenal (paper)(Wenzel Geissler, Oumy Thiongane & Emma Roth)

Percy Madhuku (paper) (Melissa Graboyes, Megan Vaughan & Charline Kopf)

John Manton (paper) (Percy Madhuku, Charline Kopf & Ruth Prince)

Kundai Manamere (abstract)(Melissa Graboyes, Wenzel Geissler & Gregg Mitman)

Jacinta Victoria Muinde*

George Mutalemwa & Y.Gez (abstract) (Noemi Tousignant, Ruth Prince & Gregg Mitman)

Ruth Prince & W.Geissler (paper) (Melissa Graboyes, Cal Biruk & John Manton)

Peter Redfield*

Emma Roth & Gregg Mitman (paper) Pierre-Marie David, Mariam Yusuf, Charline Kopf)

Noemi Tousignant (paper) (Megan Vaughan, Rebekah Ciribassi, Fatoumata Hane)

Oumy Thiongane (paper) (Emma Roth, Guilluame Lachenal & Ruth Prince)

Mariam Yussuf (paper) (Rebekah Ciribassi, Cal Biruk & Ruth Prince)

Megan Vaughan (discussant)

* Several participants had to cancel with relatively short notice to do sickness and family care obligation.

June 18 –June 19, 2026

This workshop, hosted by the UiO projects «Epidemics and African Health Systems: Covid-19 in Kenya» and «Epidemic Traces», is aimed at academics who work on the state, health and epidemics, historians and anthropologists who work on traces and remains, social scientists who work in an African context (or with epidemics), global health actors, and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI).

June 2026 | Rebekah Ciribassi, Charline Kopf, Anitha Tingira, and Fatoumata Hane| Marseille, France

In June 2026, EpiTraces postdoctoral researchers Rebekah Ciribassi and Charline Kopf will bring together project partners Anitha Tingira (University of Dar es Salaam) and Fatoumata Hane (Assane Seck University) for a collaborative writing and fieldwork workshop in Marseille. The workshop extends the Epidemic Traces project thematically and geographically into a European context, drawing on Marseille's layered history of migration, trade, and disease control as a terrain for thinking about how traces of health governance and mobility continue to shape urban spaces.

The planned programme combines shared readings and writing time with site-based explorations, including visits to the Îles du Frioul (which were former quarantine islands now turned tourist destinations), the 18th-century Hôtel-Dieu hospital, Les Paluds reclaimed swamp with its long history of sanitation and marginalization, and the Plague Wall near Avignon. The group aims to produce collaborative outputs including co-authored blog posts and shorter reflective pieces.

February 2026 | Rebekah Ciribassi and Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe | Rufiji, Tanzania

Postdoctoral researcher Rebekah Ciribassi and filmmaker Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe held their first film and photography workshop for eight residents of Kindwitwi, the town where they are conducting their ethnographic research for EpiTraces. Participants were local residents interested in learning to work with digital cameras. The first day was devoted to camera basics and shot framing; on the second, participants went out to collect their own footage; on the third, the group reviewed the footage together and discussed strategies for communicating through film. The workshop concluded with a community screening event featuring a trailer and selections from the students' initial footage.

Students will spend the following eight weeks collecting additional footage before the next workshop, a process that will continue throughout 2026 and culminate in a community film exhibition in February 2027. The workshop is part of "Containment and Flow," an ongoing film collaboration between Ciribassi and Mwakatobe developed within Work Package 4 of the EpiTraces project.

17-18 January 2026 | Charline Kopf | Bargny, Senegal

In January 2026, the 2-day workshop “Contested Ecologies – Territories, Toxicities, and Environmental Justice in Senegal” brought together community leaders, researchers, and activists in Bargny to examine how industrial expansion, urbanization, and extractive projects leave lasting environmental and health traces across coastal territories. Discussions foregrounded lived experiences of pollution, land dispossession, and ecological degradation in Bargny, Yenne, Sendou, Sebikotane, and Diamniadio, highlighting how these processes are inscribed in bodies, livelihoods, and local landscapes.

Through community testimonies, participatory mapping, and collective discussion, participants traced the uneven distribution of environmental harm, from industrial contamination and coastal erosion to declining fish stocks and emerging health concerns. Particular attention was given to how these toxic traces accumulate over time and remain unevenly documented, reinforcing the importance of linking scientific monitoring with situated knowledge, as illustrated by citizen-led pollution observatories, including Bargny’s Observatoire éco-citoyen, a co-organiser of the workshop.

The second day focused on offshore oil and gas extraction and its effects on artisanal fishing, with participants from Saint-Louis and the Saloum Delta describing disruptions to marine ecosystems, restricted access to fishing zones, and growing uncertainty around long-term health and economic impacts. Working groups on environment and health, law, culture, and economy developed recommendations for documenting and addressing these intertwined challenges, including strengthening community-based monitoring, improving access to environmental information, and supporting locally grounded responses to ecological and health risks.

Throughout the two days, a mobile podcast lab, set up by Teranga Lab, recorded interviews, conversations, and ambient discussions, documenting participants’ perspectives and creating an audio archive of the workshop. The workshop concluded with plans for a public manifesto and shared outputs, extending a collective effort to make visible and actionable the environmental and health traces shaping Senegal’s coastal futures.

Co-organisers: RAPEN, Observatoire écocitoyen, Teranga Lab, UCAD

Around 70 people participated, including community members, youth organizations, civil society actors such as RAPEN - Réseau des associations pour la protection de l'environnement et la nature and Teranga Lab, as well as researchers from the University Cheikh Anta Diop, University Assane Seck, Université numérique Cheikh Hamidou KANE, IRL 3189 - Environnement, Société et Santé, Observatoire écocitoyen and Fondation Rosa Luxemburg.

The workshop was co-financed by the Environment and Energy programme at the University of Oslo.

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qn7sy6_NzI

Other Links: https://airgeo.hypotheses.org/10285

https://terangalab.org/ecologies-contestees-a-bargny-dynamiques-intercommunales-et-recompositions-des-luttes-environnementales-sur-le-littoral-senegalais/

September 2024 | Rebekah Ciribassi | Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Together with researchers from the University of Dar es Salaam — especially from the Tanzanian contingent of the Critical Zones project — EpiTraces postdoc Rebekah Ciribassi launched the Rufiji River Research Network, with funding from the UiO Energy and Environment: International Mobility and Collaboration grant. The Network brings together a cross-disciplinary group of researchers working across the Rufiji River region in southern Tanzania, with a shared interest in the social, ecological, and political conditions shifting in the wake of the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Station, which opened in February 2024.

The group held two workshops in September 2024. The first brought together 15 researchers representing projects spanning geography, ecology, aquatic sciences, and the visual arts for a day of presentations and cross-disciplinary exchange. The second was a writing retreat to build a shared bibliography and literature review on the history of research in the Rufiji region, with a view to joint publication in an interdisciplinary environmental studies journal.

Participants included Christine Noe, Edmond Alavaisha, Abdallah Alfonce, Gerison Stephen, Irene Koko, Johnstone Andrea, Prosper Mfilinge, Rita Kalokola, Nestory Yamungu, Nicholas Mwakatobe, Anitha Tingira, and Catherine A. Masco.

Nov. 5, 2025 – Nov. 6, 2025, Kisumu 

The growing use of hazardous agrochemicals harms health and environments across Africa and the rest of the world. What can anthropologists – between East Africa and Europe – do about this chemical and political-economic challenge? How could anthropologists work together with environmental and medical scientists, and with international policymakers and activists?

Across East Africa, citizens, scientists and policymakers are raising concerns about the use of toxic synthetic pesticides in agriculture and disease control. Many of these products, including some already banned in other parts of the world, pose significant risks. Beyond immediate threats to human health, pesticides damage biodiversity, harm beneficial insects, degrade soils, poison water bodies, and disrupt aquatic life. These cascading effects undermine sustainable food production, nutrition security, and long-term environmental resilience.

The symposium “Pesticides, Environment and Health in East Africa” was hosted by Maseno University and University of Oslo, with support from the Epidemic traces and AnthEM projects at SAI/UiO, as well as Greenpeace Africa, PELUM Kenya, Road to Food and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. It brought together social anthropologists, including Masters and PhD students working on agrochemical use, and environmental scientists, activists, farmers and policymakers from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, in view of sharing knowledge of environmental harm caused by pesticide use, achievements in regional pesticide politics, and directions for future research and activism. The event was covered by national newspapers and television and attracted an audience of several hundred participants. It furthered interdisciplinary regional dialogue on the dangers of pesticide use, and will inform future policy, strengthen cross-border collaboration, and accelerate the transition towards healthy and environmentally sound food systems in East Africa.

Nov 6 2024

Together with partners from Muhimbili University the AnthEM and Epidemic Traces projects are organising a symposium on pesticide politics in Dar es Salaam.

SAI/UiO’s partners from Muhimbili University, with the support of the Epidemic Traces (NFR Fripro) and AnthEM (NORAD) projects, organised a one-day symposium about pesticide politics in Dar es Salaam in November 2024. The event was led by Tanzania’s leading occupational health toxicologist and pesticide activist, Dr Vera Ngowi, and involves mainly East African scientists, activists and policymakers.

Apart from leading specialist on environmental history and pesticides in Africa, Natalie Jas, the European partners, and the more academic concerns of social anthropology, took the back seat in this conference, literally, as this academic-cum-political event was driven by local political and scholarly priorities, and because the subject of the debate is entangled in historical and contemporary imperialisms. As such, the event constituted a unique opportunity to learn about environmental problems in East Africa and attendant political, economic and epistemic constraints faced by local actors.

Nov 18-23 2024 Kisumu, Kenya

Contemporary social life is entangled with pasts, also through material remains of the latter that endure in the present. This course aimed to make these traces of the recent past – in people’s everyday social lives, and during our own fieldwork – into integral part of ethnographic research in the 21st century present. We focused on the remains of “modernity” – broadly conceived, from colonial domination and destruction to nation-building and developmentalism – in and around the city of Kisumu, Kenya.

During the course we first introduced different theoretical and methodological approaches – from anthropology, archaeology, STS and heritage studies – to materials that were left behind by past human actions, projects and processes, and that remain in the present, as the material substrate upon which today’s people live and generate their futures from.

After a day of lectures and discussions, we undertook field-excursions to exemplary sites of modern traces in the city of Kisumu and around - the railway station, a public health laboratory, a sugar factory, the municipal waterworks, the main hospital – to engage theoretical ideas with concrete material, to discuss methodological possibilities and challenges, to compare our diverse positions towards particular traces. In the process, we jointly developed the idea of fieldwork as “tracing”, or rather, of material engagements with traces as an important part of ethnography.

(Full description of the course content)

February 2025 | Charline Kopf | Dakar, Senegal

In February 2025, the inaugural scientific workshop of the Observatoire écocitoyen (UCAD NOYYINDOO), held at the Faculty of Medicine at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, hosted an interdisciplinary group of researchers, students, artists, and institutional partners working across the social, environmental, and health sciences. The workshop marked the launch of the observatory’s scientific council and focused on pollution and socio-environmental transformations in the Sébikotane–Diamniadio–Bargny zone. As a member of the observatory, Charline Kopf and Fatoumata Hane participated in the launch and presented the ongoing research on Bargny, examining environmental change, air pollution and experiences of everyday exposure (Work package 3 of Epitraces).

September 2025 | Charline Kopf | Sokndal / Stavanger, Norway

In September 2025, Charline participated in Mutant Prospects, the ninth edition of Coast Contemporary, an interdisciplinary gathering of artists, curators, and researchers exploring extractivism, environmental transformation, and shifting futures. The programme, centered on the theme of “mutant prospects,” engaged with how industrial and ecological processes generate unstable, evolving landscapes and forms of life, combining presentations, site visits to mining areas, and exhibitions across Sokndal and Stavanger, Norway.

As part of the international visitors programme, she presented her ongoing research project Atmospheres of Dust: Particles, Pollution & Protests, in collaboration with the artist Hamedine Kane, examining air pollution, respiratory health, and the history of meteorology in West Africa. The presentation explored both natural and industrial dust—from Saharan atmospheric flows to mining and industrial particles—highlighting how dust circulates across landscapes and bodies and becomes a site of measurement, care and political negotiation.

The participation was funded by the Aslaug Johanne og Johannes Falkenbergs stiftelse.

October 2025 – Ongoing | Rebekah Ciribassi and Charline Kopf | Oslo, Norway

Over the past year, postdoctoral researchers Rebekah Ciribassi and Charline Kopf have developed a collaborative research initiative borrowing the concept of "negative space" from the visual arts to establish a shared theoretical heuristic and methodological strategy that brings together ethnographers and artists. Negative space asks how certain people, histories, and things come to be treated as background through relationships of power, and what that backgrounding makes possible in the foreground.

The initiative took shape through a call for papers that brought together interdisciplinary scholars and artists working across ethnography, archival research, and visual and artistic methods. At the Norsk Antropologisk Forening (Norwegian Anthropological Association) conference at the University of Oslo on 24–26 October 2025, Ciribassi and Kopf co-convened a two-part panel, "Unmissable Absences," which brought together seven researchers (Lotte Danielsen, Sadie Hale, Lena Gross, Cherry Jackson, Ieva Raubiško, Martine Greek, Eline Løvlien) along with visual artist Sithabile Mlotshwa, who presented her collage work on the visualization of colonial violence through the archives. The panel was followed by a two-day workshop to develop papers for a special issue-in-progress, with contributions from Marianna Betti, Michelle Henning, Reiko Iida, Ieva Raubiško, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Endira F. Julianda, Charline Kopf, Louis Pille-Schneider, Rebekah Ciribassi, Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe, and Sithabile Mlotshwa. The project has also generated a blog proposal, currently under review, featuring a broader collection of more experimental scholarship.