Janina Kehr is a social anthropologist who specialised in medical anthropology. She works on the politics of time and the moral economy of medicine and public health in contemporay Europe. In 2017, she took up a position as SNSF-Ambizione Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern with a habilitation project on Austerity Medicine in Spain. She therein investigates public health infrastructures and practices of care at the intersection of debt economies, state bureaucracies and peoples’ experiences.
She studied Anthropology and Political Sciences at the University of Göttingen and the University of California Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris and the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012. Between 2011 and 2017, she has worked on an interdisciplinary terrain in Medical Humanities as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Zurich.
She writes about ongoing research activities on her blog “Medical Modernities.”
Research Fields
- Medical Anthropology
- Biopolitics
- Anthropology of the State
- Economic Anthropology of Health
Research Topics
- Politics of Austerity
- Health and rationing
- Biomedicine and global public health
- Care and social welfare in Southern Europe
- Health citizenship
- Bodily Belonging
- Medicine and migration
Current Research Projects
Austerity Medicine. Precarious Healthcare in Contemporary Spain
