Pia Juul Bjertrup

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PhD project: Within the last decade, diagnoses and diagnostic tests have increasingly become part of the global health agenda and the use of rapid diagnostic tests is gaining ground in countries with resource-poor health systems and in health systems with limited laboratory capacity. This is the background for my PhD project, which examines how people in a peri-urban area of the capital Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso understand and negotiate visibility and invisibility of diseases and epidemics. The working title of the PhD project is (In)visible Epidemics – Disease Visibility during Pandemic Times in peri-urban Burkina Faso. In the project, I explore how the population attempts to make their suffered illnesses visible to the public health system, and how the Covid-19 pandemic is made visible through the media, health statistics and state restrictions, but remains absent and invisible to the population as a bodily experience in a context of limited test capacity.

The PhD project is affiliated with the interdisciplinary research project titled “EMERGING EPIDEMICS: Improving preparedness in Burkina Faso”, which is funded by Danida (grant number: 17-06-KU).

Supervisor: Helle Samuelsen

Read more about the Emerging Epidemics research project: https://anthropology.ku.dk/research/research-projects/current-projects/improving-preparedness-in-burkina-faso/