Co-Supervisor
Biography
Branwyn is an Assistant Professor in the Health, Care and the Body research group at the University of Amsterdam. Sbe is a critical medical anthropologist whose work centers on the practice of public, global and planetary health, drawing on long term ethnographic research in Dakar, Senegal.
Since 2018, Branwyn’s research has focused on everyday eating and the politics of diet in urban Senegal. Her work on the impact of the emergence of chronic disease on how people procure, prepare and share food has been published in Critical Public Health, Body and Society, Food and Culture, and Somatosphere.
Branwyn’s monograph Lines of Sight: Public Health in a Senegalese Image World (under review) brings together visual and medical anthropology to examine how health authorities, filmmakers, Sufi urban artists, and environmental activists created publics around depictions of the body. Analyzing vernacular images for their didactic efficacy, and public health interventions for their auratic potentiality, Lines of Sight examines the immersion of public health communication in local image worlds and media ecologies. Through a series of communicative cases (health literacy, suasive speech, mass protest, dramaturgical scenarios, and the representation of the unseen), Lines of Sightasks how the calibration of communitas embedded in Senegalese images can help us to imagine and practice a different kind of public health.
Publications
Poleykett, B. (2024). “For us women, flavour is king”: Gender, saf sap and flavour work in urban Senegal. Food, Culture and Society, 27(4), 1171-1186.
Poleykett, B., Sall, N., Ndow, F., & Young, P. (2024). Coproducing “Planetary” Eating Futures from Dakar: Dietary Diffusionism and the (Geo)politics of Nutrition Transition. Gastronomica, 24(2), 58-67.
Poleykett, B. (2023). Living with “new diseases” in Dakar: Embodied time and the emergence of chronicity. Body & Society, 29(2), 77-98.