Dr Anna Wood

My doctoral research explored the politics of welfare and social protection through two flagship projects: the bourse familiale, a national cash transfer, and Couverture Maladie Universelle (universal health coverage). Introduced as grand projets at the heart of Senegal’s development plan, these programmes formed part of a broader politics of la sociale, the French shorthand for welfare or social policy, and a term that in Senegal carries a culturally specific and expansive meaning. Drawing on twenty months of doctoral and postdoctoral fieldwork in a small informal settlement in Dakar, this work examines how moral and material claims sustain political life in Senegal. I am currently developing this research into a monograph.

My new project, Housing Futures at Senegal’s Urban Frontier, builds on this through a study of the national housing agenda. It follows residents in the process of being resettled from the site of my doctoral research, alongside other pathways into the programme, including inclusive loans and housing cooperatives. Focusing on two new towns being built on the outskirts of Dakar and the second city, Thiès, the project examines the political, temporal, and moral stakes of state promises for housing.

Alongside my research, I am developing collaborative and public-facing projects, including an exhibition project, Xolu Dakar bi (The Heart of Dakar), with two Dakar-based photographers documenting the resettlement. I am co-investigator on Trajectories of Displacement, a collaborative project with a colleague in Human Geography at Université Cheikh Anta Diop. In my role as Knowledge Exchange and Funding Facilitator, I support the Department across impact, research culture and grant writing.

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

• 2024. Invoking Senghor: Universal Healthcare Coverage and the Place of Culture in Senegal. Medicine Anthropology Theory. 11(2), 1-8. (link)
• 2023. Patronage, Partnership, Voluntarism: Community-based health insurance and the improvisation of universal health coverage in Senegal. Social Science & Medicine. 319, 115491. (link), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115491

Book reviews

• 2024. Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market, An anthropology of endings, by Gunvor Jónsson. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. (30(4), 1164-1165. (link)
• 2023. A Slow Emancipation. Africa is a Country. (Review of: Slaves for Peanuts, A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop that changed History, by Jori Lewis). (link)
• 2017. Give a man a fish: reflections on the new politics of distribution, by James Ferguson. Cambridge Review of International Affairs. 30(4), 415-417. (link)
• 2017. Afrotopia, by Felwine Sarr. Africa at LSE blog. (link)

Other writing

• 2024. The case of the CFA franc and a case for South-centred scholarship. Development Studies Association/ European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes workshop blog. (link)
• 2024. Diomaye’s first weeks. Africa is a Country. (link)
• 2024. New Knowledge Exchange and Funding Facilitator. Department of Social Anthropology website. (link)
• 2023. Geographies of Hope. Development Studies Association. ‘The Politics of Development’ workshop blog. (link)
• 2022. The State and Social Welfare in the 21st Century. CRASSH conference blog, with Courtney Hallink. (link)
• 2020. Different Ways of Knowing: Paradise Cinema Interviewed. The Quietus. (Interview and translation, for the writer). (link)
• 2020. A ‘grand projet’: Senegal’s Universal Health Coverage.’ Special Issue: Health for all? Anthropological and historical perspectives on ‘Universal Health Coverage.’ Somatosphere.
• 2018. The Ideal meets the Practical. Citizen’s Basic Income Trust. Newsletter, 1, 3-6. (link)