by Bianca Masuku, Anastasia Koch, Ed Young, Digby Warner and Nolwazi Mkhwanazi

The accompanying podcast offers a reflection on Eh!woza, a youth-based community engagement project focusing on tuberculosis (TB). Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Eh!woza functions as an interactive and interrogative platform, contrasting perspectives and concepts of TB as biomedical disease with personal experiences of TB within areas afflicted by poverty and high rates of HIV. The project is a collaboration between scientists based in an infectious disease research institute, a conceptual/visual artist, a youth-based educational NGO, and young learners from a community heavily burdened with TB. Using film as a tool to interrogate different aspects of the disease, Eh!woza highlights the relationship (and sometimes lack thereof) between biomedical knowledge and social understandings of TB illness. The work highlights the concept that disease is not accidental – social context, environment and circumstances shape the bodies we have, and the bodies we have shape our experiences of and in the world.

Read the full article on the Medical Humanities Journal website.