The Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Leuven (KULeuven), in collaboration with the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo (UiO), invites applications for one fully-funded 3-year PhD fellowship in social and cultural anthropology starting on 1 September 2026. The positions are funded by the EU Research and Innovation programme Horizon Europe, under a grant by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Networks (MSCA-DN). The successful candidates must commence their PhD degree programme on 1 September 2026.
Background HEALENAE:
KULeuven and UiO have embarked on the collaborative project HEALENAE: Health and Environment in Africa and Europe run by a consortium of universities: in Aarhus (Denmark), Edinburgh (UK), Leuven (Belgium), Nairobi (Kenya), and Oslo (Norway) and Makerere University (Uganda).
The HEALENAE Doctoral Network offers a cross-continental, innovative, interdisciplinary, and multi-sectoral anthropological approach to pressing, interrelated health and environmental challenges across contemporary Africa and Europe. HEALENAE seeks to develop a strong interdisciplinary network that is based in anthropology, global one health, environmental and regional studies, to examine connections, correspondences and new challenges for health and environmental contexts in and between Africa and Europe.
By exploring specific topic areas of health and environment through long-term anthropological fieldwork, the research will provide insights into, and enable the future mitigations of, challenges related to current demographic, disease, climate and environmental changes, accelerated urbanisation, uneven growth, refugee issues, and gender and generational dynamics. The HEALENAE Doctoral Candidates will collaborate across projects to bring together insights anchored in different sectors and countries. They will analyse these in relation to each other creating clarity of interlinkages between specific health and environmental domains in an intercontinental perspective. Together, approaches from anthropology, post-colonial and regional studies on health and environment offer unique research perspectives and methods providing grounded, bottom-up understandings of how environments and health issues play out in everyday settings.
The research network offers an academically stimulating and interdisciplinary working environment, an innovative training programme that allows the PhD fellows to obtain specialist knowledge on a specific research topic as well as transferable skills that can be employed in academic as well as non-academic institutions. The HEALENAE PhD education includes one year of fieldwork in Africa and/or Europe (in total), annual training schools and writing retreats and 6 months stay with the secondary university. HEALENAE also offers an attractive salary, the opportunity of favourable pension benefits as well as funding for research, travel, conference participation and dissemination, books and equipment.
The HEALENAE project strives equal opportunity for diversity among the DCs. We encourage candidates from all continents, applicants with disabilities and minorities to apply. The salary will include social security and be composed of living and mobility allowances and a family allowance where appropriate, as outlined in the table on p.118 of the MSCA Work Programme 2023-2025: wp-2-msca-actions_horizon-2023-2024_en.pdf
Aim: To study forms of ‘chronic living’ in and around zones, sites or regions in Africa with heavy exposure to toxicity and pollution and environmental change. The focus will be on how different generations experience, recognize and register harms, which may extend from bodily harms to the more-than-human environment and the livelihoods it provides. Elderly people will be foregrounded here, as they have lived through and observed environmental change, long-term, toxic exposure, or pollution hazards, which are registered in their bodies and lives. This project could explore forms of chronic disease, or registers of bodily harm (including mental distress and mourning) that do not (yet) congeal into recognizable disease categories. The project could also attend to local registers of such harms as they traverse bodies, relations, ecologies and landscapes, as well as to how these local understandings and experiences, embedded in lived experiences, become recognized (or not) and translated (or not) into ‘chronic’ disease categories or forms of redress, repair, and remedial action.
Objectives: 1. To explore how communities exposed to toxicity, pollution or other forms of ecological change experience and articulate harm to their bodies, minds and environments – with a focus on older generations or the elderly. 2. To explore how older generations/the elderly observe and explain the longer-term transformations and distributions of harm that have become embedded in everyday life. 3. To trace attempts to make such harms visible, recognized and registered, including attempts to translate them into forms recognized by e.g. medicine, science, policy and governance – or examine why such attempts are absent or unsuccessful. 4. To understand how everyday forms of care, repair or recovery are imagined and practised, and the respective roles played by different generations, as well as by local and non-local organizations or activist groups in these processes.
Expected Results: The project will contribute to a better understanding of ways of living with, and well as attempts to care for, damaged bodies and worlds, with a focus on the experiences of older people and the elderly in Africa. It will map various chronic harms and create analytical perspectives on forms of ‘chronic living’, boundaries between bodies and environments, and the ways harm may be registered in bodies and its impact on mental health, seeking long-term perspectives through attention to generational experiences.
Planned Secondment:
1. UiO, one semester, to engage in another academic environment and get face to face supervision from co-supervisor Ruth Jane Prince;
2. During fieldwork, the DC may also spend time with NGOs or activist groups working in the study area.
