Josien de Klerk
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Josien obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2011. Her PhD and subsequent Post-Doctoral research centered around aging in the era of AIDS in Kenya and Tanzania, looking at informal care, including self-care, of both affected and infected older people in rural and urban settings. Her long-term ethnographic fieldwork is the basis of critical analysis of the politics around aging and care in the treatment-dominated AIDS landscape in East-Africa.
Josien has alternated an academic career with applied research and project management for different NGOs. Her current research interests evolve around chronic illness and well-being across the life course in Eastern Africa and the ageing body in the context of changing welfare state policies in the Netherlands. At AIGHD, Josien is the lead social scientist in the Shinyanga project: an interdisciplinary project aiming to improve availability, access to and retention in HIV Care in rural Tanzania.