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Dr Anitha Tingira

Position
LUCAS / LARI Virtual Research Fellow 2022
Location
Tanzania
Faculty
Arts Humanities and Cultures
School
LAHRI / LUCAS
Website
Twitter

Currently a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Dar es Salaam, Anitha will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds between April and September 2022.

Whilst here she will be collaborating on her project "Acceptance and Hesitancy to Vaccinate:  Examination of COVID-19 Vaccination Experiences in Tanzania" with Maryam Ba-Break (School of Medicine) and Simon Manda (School of Politics and International Studies).

Project Overview

This study seeks to understand factors that condition acceptance and hesitancy to COVID-19 vaccination by examining individual understandings and experiences of COVID-19 vaccination I Tanzania. I argue that, people's understandings and experiences about vaccination are embedded in local moral worlds in which they situate themselves as individuals, community members and members of a dynamic body politic. In this regard, willingness and hesitancy to vaccinate  are conditioned not by global narratives of immunization and safety advocate by the WHO and national states, but by how people make sense of vaccination in relation to their own cultural logics, local conceptions of risk, and knowledge about COVID-19 vaccination in specific socio-cultural, political and historical settings. Focusing on the African centered approach, I use hesitancy to vaccinate as a starting point to engage with broader debates on epistemological authority and legitimacy of universal biomedical interventions and how such interventions are reformulated and situated knowledge is developed in the African context. I doing so, I show the critical importance of foregrounding situated knowledge in designing different and sustainable vaccination strategies in addressing the global pandemic in Africa.