Branwyn Poleykett

Branwyn Poleykett

  • Research Fellow

Branwyn Poleykett is an Assistant Professor in the Health, Care & the Body group. She specializes in the study of public, global, and planetary health and has conducted the majority of her research in the West African city of Dakar, in Senegal.

Her PhD (LSE, 2012) examined the regulation of commercial sexual intimacies in Dakar. Following her Ph.D., she held postdoctoral positions at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of Cambridge, the Rachel Carson Centre at LMU Munich, and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. Branwyn has published on the Africanisation of global health research and the role of transnational pedagogy and capacity building in perpetuating epistemic inequality. She has a particular interest in health communication and visual methods in global health research and she is currently finalizing her monograph Lines of Sight: Decolonisation, Development and the Image World of Senegalese Hygiene.

Since 2018, Branwyn has conducted ethnographic research in Dakar households to better understand and trace the complex connections between food insecurity and the emergence of chronic diseases in the city. Drawing on perspectives from medical anthropology, social epidemiology, and political ecology, and rooted in collaborations with public health, agronomy, and clinical nutrition, her work has examined how precarious suburban households manage multiple nutrition challenges: undernutrition, stunting, wasting, hidden hunger, deficiencies, overweight and NCDs. Now, her work increasingly examines the stakes of sustainable food production and consumption in the West African Sahel, with a particular focus on the Senegalese Niayes.

For a full list of Branwyn’s publications click here