Bodywork: Health, Beauty, and Transformation in Africa (2024-2029)

Funded by the SSHRC.

About the project:

Africa, a continent stereotypically known for its famines and chronic malnutrition, is now facing a growing obesity epidemic, and undergoing what global health observers describe as an epidemiological transition, as non-communicable diseases that were once mainly found in industrialized nations increasingly also afflict communities across the global South. African countries are also undergoing a demographic transition whereby more people are surviving into older age with chronic conditions. This research contributes to a growing body of scholarly works on changing health landscapes in the global South through the perspective of wellness (rather than illness) and with a focus on forms of bodywork that are driven by more than health preoccupations; that is, ways of working on the body at the intersection of health and beauty, such as exercise, dieting, surgical interventions, and the use of alternative medicines. It asks what kinds of subjectivities, social relations, and ways of being in the world, are produced when health and beauty meet as competing or complementary pursuits. Bodywork thus heeds a call to provide other stories about health and health-seeking in Africa through generating nuanced accounts of life on the ground in diverse African settings.