Ian and Dieter talk with Dr Chisomo Kalinga and Dr Carla Tsampiras about the growth of Medical and Health Humanities Africa (MHHA). Adopting an intersectional perspective, Chisomo and Carla discuss many exciting projects and initiatives focused on the south of the continent.

Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Her work approaches literary and medical narratives from a transdisciplinary approach using both aesthetic interpretation and ethnography. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African oral and print literatures. She is currently supporting efforts to promote the Malawi Medical Humanities Network (MMHN), an interdisciplinary network for Malawiana researchers, and the Medical and Health Humanities Network Africa (South Africa) to share events, programmes, projects and exhibitions that explore the links between health and the humanities.

Dr Carla Tsampiras is a senior lecturer in Medical and Health Humanities (MHH) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a social historian of health interested in the relationships between narratives and ideas about gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, and health (individual and planetary). She has written on the early years of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa; gender violence and slavery in the Cape colony; MHH in health sciences education and the development of the field of MHH in the region. Her current research work is concerned with flesh foods (meat), gender, power, and violence. She is a member of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS), sits on the Environmental Humanities South working group, is a board member of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham, and is a founding member of the Medical and Health Humanities Africa network.