Biography
Thandeka is a Research Associate on the Cartographies of Cancer project at King's. She completed her PhD in 2020 in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, studying libraries, literacy and children's stories in rural Malawi.
Born and raised in South Africa, she moved to Europe in 2012 to undertake an MPhil in Intellectual History at Cambridge, followed by an MSc in Social Anthropology at the university of Amsterdam.
She has run and founded multiple societies and projects in South Africa, and has been involved in various development and research projects in the region.
Research
- Social anthropology and medical anthropology
- Science and technology studies
- The history and philosophy of science
- Social and cultural history
- Colonialism and post-colonialism
- Southern and eastern Africa
- Education, literacy, early literacy and childhood education
- Epistemologies
Thandeka's current research focuses cancer registries in Africa. For this project, she is conducting archival research in London on the colonial history of cancer registries in Africa and the British Empire Cancer Campaign. She will conduct two months' fieldwork at the Cancer Registry in Nairobi, Kenya where she will study the production of cancer data.
The project explores questions of public health imaginaries and the accompanying socio-technical infrastructures that emerge in the creation of cancer registries. It explores the colonial emergence and entanglement of cancer registries in Africa and the knowledges and discourses these produced.
Further details
See Thandeka's research profile