Abstract
This presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Khwisero, Western Kenya, and on my recent article in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, In the Shadow of HIV: Fear, Rumor, and Stigma among Young Women Living with HIV in the COVID 19 Pandemic. I explore how the lingering legacies of the HIV epidemic shaped local experiences of COVID 19 and its vaccination campaign, particularly among women whose reproductive lives were already marked by stigma, loss, and uncertainty. Rather than treating vaccine hesitancy as misinformation or individual resistance, I trace how reproductive fears, kinship authority, violence, historical memory, therapeutic pluralism, and temporal reasoning intersect in women’s everyday lives, producing complex and sometimes contradictory responses to public health interventions. Women’s bodies emerge as sites where epidemics, state policies, moral judgement, and reproductive aspirations converge. The presentation moves between the scarred landscape of Dudi village, shaped by decades of HIV related loss, and intimate ethnographic encounters in clinics, homes, and support groups. It shows how COVID 19 vaccination became entangled with older narratives of infection, infertility, and control, reviving stigma while also generating new forms of negotiation, secrecy, and care. More broadly, the presentation reflects ethnographic reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. I argue that reproductive anxieties and vaccine rumors are not simply obstacles to public health, but analytic windows into how women navigate layered histories of intervention and vulnerability. By situating contemporary vaccine controversies within longer trajectories of HIV, gendered power, and postcolonial health governance, the talk highlights how epidemics accumulate in place, and how reproductive futures are negotiated within deeply unequal medical landscapes.
Bio
Mariam is a medical anthropologist whose work focuses on reproductive futures and the uncertainties of reproductive bodies embedded in new health interventions in Western Kenya. She is a PhD student at the Institute of Anthropology, Gender and African Studies, University of Nairobi, under the NRC funded project Epidemics and African Health Systems: COVID 19 in Kenya. She holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
