Karine Aasgaard Jansen

Karine Aasgaard Jansen is a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway. She holds an MSc in social anthropology and a PhD in cultural studies from the University of Bergen.

Karine has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Réunion, Mauritius and Madagascar. For example, she was the PI of the research project “Contagion and culture: The 2005-2007 chikungunya epidemic in the Western Indian Ocean” at Umeå University (2016-19). The study was funded by the Swedish Research Council and was a comparative medical anthropological project on human-environment interaction, and its effect on the diffusion and understanding of vector-borne diseases such as chikungunya across the islands of Réunion and Mauritius.

She has worked within the field of medical anthropology throughout her whole career, primarily focusing on issues at the interface between health and politics. Her primary research interests concern cultural conceptualizations of disease and contagion, in particular how political discourses and public health interventions feed into local illness experiences. She is also strongly committed to issues concerning women’s health, including gender-based violence, menstrual stigma, and fertility control. Since 2016 she has also been affiliated to the Global Health Anthropology research group at the Centre for International Health at the University of Bergen with a study on illegal abortion in Madagascar.

Select Publications

2020: Cleaning the womb: Views on fertility control and menstruation among students in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Culture, Health & Sexuality Jul 9:1-14. doi: 10.1080/13691058.2020.1773539. 

2020: Challenging chikungunya: Resistance to public health measures and etiology during the 2005-2007 epidemic in Réunion. In G. Campbell and E. Knoll (eds.) Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave McMillan.

2018: What to expect when you’re expecting a pandemic: Public health and lay perceptions of the 2009-2010 swine flu outbreak and mass vaccination in Norway, Ethnologia Scandinavica 48.

2016: Tropical disease and the making of France in Réunion. In A. Winterbottom and F. Teshaye (eds.) Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World, Volume 2: The Modern Period, Palgrave Macmillan.

2013: Otherness and Disease in Réunion: The Politicisation of the 2005 to 2007 Chikungunya Epidemic. PhD dissertation, Faculty of Humanities, University of Bergen.

2013: Post-colonialism and otherness re-examined: Irigaray, Réunion and decolonisation through inclusion,Ethnologia Scandinavica 43.

2013: The 2005–2007 Chikungunya epidemic in Réunion: Ambiguous etiologies, memories and meaning-making, Medical Anthropology 32 (2).

2012: The printed press’s representations of the 2005–2007 chikungunya epidemic in Réunion: political polemics and (post)colonial disease, Journal of African Media Studies 4 (2).