Janina Kehr

Janina Kehr is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Global Health at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She studied ethnology and political science at the University of Göttingen and the University of California Santa Cruz. In 2012 she obtained her PhD with a co-tutelle de these on TB control in France and Germany at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales Paris and the Humboldt University Berlin. Based on her PhD research, she has just published a book (in French) entitled “Spectres de la tuberculose. Une maladie du passé au temps present”. In the book, she analyzes how TB – in France and Germany – is conceived of as a disease of the past in a future driven world and as a disease of immigrants in a world of new and old borders. The control of tuberculosis thus resonates with broader issues of social order, time and otherness: access to health care, social inequalities, racial discrimination, and imaginings of progress and regression. By combining historical sensitivity with a detailed ethnography of tuberculosis control in two rich Western countries, the book sheds light on the hauntings of the past and the medical, political and social paradoxes that inform clinical practice and public health on a daily basis in the present. She has published on TB in Medical Anthropology, Medicine, Anthropology, Theory, Global Public Health, Sociology of Health and Illness among other venues.