Meet Our 2014 Wadsworth International Fellows: Celso Inguane

The Wadsworth International Fellowship provides the opportunity for students in countries where anthropological education is underrepresented to receive world-class training at a university abroad. In the first of a series of posts introducing this year’s new cohort of fellows, we meet Celso Inguane, a Mozambican cultural anthropologist now at the University of Washington, Seattle and working on questions of neoliberalism and crisis.

I am Mozambican and a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. I have a BA with Honors in Anthropology from the Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique (2006), which included ethnographic research on assistance provided by social networks to people living with HIV in Maputo City. This research was part of my academic interest in documenting how socially vulnerable groups deal with life-threatening crises in a neoliberal context. In 2008, I completed an MA in Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, including a multi-sited ethnographic research on the negotiation of national memory by ‘subaltern’ social groups, local elites and the Mozambican state, with a focus on heritage sites in Mandhlakazi, Southern Mozambique.

Upon completion of the MA, I worked as national coordinator of the Mozambique Aids Indicator Survey (2008-2010) and of the integrated biological and behavioral surveys on key populations for HIV and AIDS in Mozambique (2010-2013). This work experience prepared me professionally for the complexities of managing long-term global health research projects and interactions with national and global level actors. It also suggested the complex ways in which local, national and global actors and processes relate to health issues, and how innovative multi-sited and historically oriented ethnographic research can illuminate these dynamics.

My PhD research topic segues from my work experience and from my undergraduate research. Broadly, I intend to (a) map the different social actors (patients, healthcare professionals, the Mozambican state, donors, NGOs, etc.) involved in ensuring retention of patients in HIV care, and (b) document how they mobilize strategies, and negotiate historically-established and emerging moral economies in a neoliberal context in Southern Mozambique.

I feel privileged for receiving academic training at the UW, and confident that I will complete the PhD with the highest level of academic excellence. This is because the Department of Anthropology includes faculty who are globally-renowned experts in HIV and global health research in Africa and Mozambique, with excellent track records of graduate student advising. Additionally, the department’s PhD program focuses on training students for research and teaching careers – a tradition particularly distinctive to North America.