Africa Table Showcase: Diving Deep into the Research of African Studies Graduate Students

Join us for a special Africa Table session featuring graduate students' work, including presentations by Zahra Fazal and Venolia Rabodiba.

RSVP Required

Zahra Fazal

Talk Title: The equity-cost of the global vaccine scramble: barriers to vaccination for people with albinism in Tanzania

Session Description: The session will present the findings from the first ever health equity study to document the journey of a marginalized community in accessing the COVID-19 vaccine in Tanzania.  People With Albinism (PWA) are regarded as Africa's most stigmatized group and have often been overlooked in global health. The study collected both quantitative and qualitative data to contextualize the systemic barriers that PWA faced in accessing different kinds of vaccines. The session will touch on how community-led research and data-driven approaches can serve to decolonize global health in Africa. The session will also share some of the knowledge translations tools that were developed from a rap song in Swahili-English, a mural art wall and radio segments.  

Biography: Zahra Fazal, from Morogoro, Tanzania, is pursuing a Master’s degree in Epidemiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. She graduated from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada with a bachelor’s degree in Global health and nutrition as a Karen McKellin International Leader of Tomorrow scholar. Her research spans the intersection of social and infectious disease epidemiology, emphasizing community-driven research to advance health equity in under-served populations.

Venolia Rabodiba

Talk Title: Assembling Connectivity: Infrastructural pathways to Regional Integration in southern and East Africa

Session Description: New material arrangements technically referred to as ‘corridor connectivity infrastructures’ are sites of historic investment on the African continent. In this talk, Venolia Rabodiba introduces this moment as infrastructuralization – a 50-year unfolding imagined by African states and endorsed by a suite of institutions including the African Union, Japan International Cooperation Agency, and the World Bank as a strategic move for the achievement of often conflicting political and economic objectives. Key technical and legal documents such as bilateral agreements, regional development masterplans, and a continental free trade agreement are some indicators of this moment. Infrastructuralization is a more-than-material unfolding whose implications she ethnographically traces from the node of a newly reconfigured border post along sub-Saharan Africa’s largest trade corridor.  In this talk, Venolia foregrounds ethnographic observations of early negotiations between SADC officials regarding the construction of shared control zones (One-Stop Border Posts or OSBPs) during the delegation’s training tour in East Africa.

Biography: Venolia Rabodiba is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.  She is a scholar of political and development anthropology, critical geography, and science & technology studies. Her doctoral dissertation is a multi-nodal ethnography of regional integration in southern Africa.