Care, infrastructures and antiblackness: the making of biomedicine in a Sierra Leonean hospital

The research project offers an in-depth analysis of the conflation between biomedical practice, care and antiblackness in the colonial wake.

Using historical, geographic and ethnographic methods, it examines how the history of enslavement and colonialism is entangled with notions and practices of Western biomedical care and the spatial organisation of a postcolonial hospital. As a location for this study I have chosen Connaught Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Situated on Freetown's Northern coast between White Man's Bay and Susan's Bay, this was both the setting for mandatory quarantines for liberated slaves and the site of the British-built Colonial Hospital.

Working with Sierra Leonean healthcare staff, I will examine the hold this violent past has on Sierra Leonean conceptions of care and trust in biomedicine.

This allows me to 1) explore how biomedicine's conflation with antiblackness shapes biomedical encounters in postcolonial Sierra Leone and 2) examine how biomedical spaces and infrastructures perpetuate feelings of distrust and exclude other forms of care.

In doing so I will 1) challenge the traditional geographical remit of Black Studies, 2) study how antiblackness weaves its way through medicine and care and 3) give Fanon's analyses of colonialism, racism and biomedicine a contemporary & geographic dimension.