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LAURIE DENYER WILLIS

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. My work is multimodal, concerned with the relationships between the sensory life of bodies, suburbanism, and human-animal-capital relations. Get in touch at Laurie.denyerwillis@ed.ac.uk  

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Stackable Life

This work is part of a collaborative project with anthropologists in Kampala, Uganda and Bangkok, Thailand, through the project Antimicrobials In Society (AMIS) at LSHTM. In the suburbs of Kampala, chicken farming is being transformed through the logics of stacking and scalability. These practices are then interwoven with new commercial agrarian families in the suburbs, and their concerns about zoonotic disease, climate sustainability, economic futures, and the life and death of animals, microbes, plants and humans on their suburban lands. Our work attends to the logics of consumption and protein in the context of flexible industrialism in the post-colony, with an emphasis on how bodies - and what they consume - are racialised and made political through the policing of enmeshed life. We approach bodies, their consumables, and their environments as interstiched; bodies sieve foods and microbes, as much as they sieve postcolonial environments premised in surveillance and captivity. 

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Laurie Denyer Willis: Quote

The Salvific Sensorium

My first book project, The Salvific Sensorium: Pentecostal Life in Rio de Janeiro’s Subúrbios, is based on long term ethnographic research. The manuscript has been selected by the University of California Press as part of the series Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century.

In the manuscript I attend to the entanglements of bodies, pollutants and suburban infrastructures, tracing how Pentecostalism, race, and the senses matter in the construction of new kinds of affective space. In doing so, I work through feminist affect theory to develop a theory of power that foregrounds the senses, feeling, and emotion to break apart entrenched public-private binaries in analyses of religious communities and right-wing populism in the city. 

Laurie Denyer Willis: Quote

PUBLICATIONS

Forthcoming 2022

Nayiga, S., Denyer Willis, L., Staedke, S & Chandler, C. I. R. Taking opportunities, Taking medicines: Antibiotic use in Rural Eastern Uganda

Medical Anthropology. (Accepted). 

2022

Nayiga, S., Denyer Willis, L., Staedke, S & Chandler, C. I. R. Reconciling imperatives: Clinical guidelines, antibiotic prescribing and the enactment of good care in lower-level health facilities in Tororo, Uganda. Global Public Health, Online First (OPEN ACCESS)

 

2021

Nabirye, C., Denyer Willis, L., Nayiga, S., Kayendeke, M., Staedke, S. G., & Chandler, C. I. R. Antibiotic ‘entanglements’: health, labour and everyday life in an urban informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda. Critical Public Health, Online First (OPEN ACCESS)

2021 

Dixon, Justin; MacPherson, Eleanor Elizabeth; Nayiga, Susan; Manyau, Salome; Nabirye, Christine; Kayendeke, Miriam; Sanudi, Esnart; Nkaombe, Alex;Mareke, Portia; Sitole, Kenny; de Lima Hutchison, Coll; Bradley, John; Yeung, Shunmay; Ferrand, Rashida Abbas; Lal, Sham; Roberts, Chrissy; Green, Edward; Denyer Willis, Laurie; Staedke, Sarah G; Chandler, Clare IR. Antibiotic stories: a mixed-methods, multi-country analysis of household antibiotic use in Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe. BMJ Global Health, 6 (11). (OPEN ACCESS)

 

2020                

Denyer Willis, Laurie. In Attention to Pain: Governance and Bodies in Brazil. Medical Anthropology, 39(4). 

 

2020                

Hyde, Sandra and Laurie Denyer Willis. Introduction to a Special Issue: Balancing the Quotidian: Precarity, Care and Pace in Anthropology’s Storytelling. Medical Anthropology, 39(4). (OPEN ACCESS) 

 

2020

Nayiga, S., Kayendeke, M., Nabirye, C., Denyer Willis, L., Chandler, C. I. R., & Staedke, S. Use of antibiotics to treat humans and animals in Uganda: a cross-sectional survey of households and farmers in rural, urban and peri-urban settings. Journal of Antimicrobial Resistance, 2(4). (OPEN ACCESS). 

2019                            

Denyer Willis, Laurie. The File Story: A Multimodal Experiment in Sensory Ethnographic Writing on Sexual Violence. ‘Con-text-ure: Visual and New Media Review Series’, Cultural Anthropology. (OPEN ACCESS)

 

2019                            

Denyer Willis, Laurie and Clare Chandler. Quick fix for care, productivity, hygiene and inequality: Reframing the entrenched problem of antibiotic overuse. The BMJ (Global Health), 4(4). (OPEN ACCESS)

 

2019                            

Dixon J, MacPherson E, Manyau S, Nayiga S, Khine Zaw Y, Kayendeke M, Nabirye C, Denyer Willis L, de Lima Hutchison C, Chandler CIR. The ‘Drug Bag’ method: Lessons from anthropological studies of antibiotic use in Africa and South-East Asia. Global Health Action, 12(1). 

 

2018                           

Denyer Willis, Laurie. It Smells Like 1,000 Angels Marching: The ‘salvific sensorium’ in Rio de Janeiro’s Western Subúrbios. Cultural Anthropology, 33(2). (OPEN ACCESS)

Laurie Denyer Willis: About
Laurie Denyer Willis: Text
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