Dr. Alexander
Kagaha

Alexander Kagaha is a medical sociologist and a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral researcher at Makerere University School of Public Health. His research interrogates the power and politics of medical practice and healthcare policy, as well as material technologies. His current research on malaria in infants and young children explores how boundaries of consciousness shape and limit malaria control and obscure understanding of how human entanglement with ecological materialities shapes bodies and bodily risks of disease.

His doctoral research investigated how power operates through the policy and practice of abortion care delivery in Uganda's restrictive moral, legal and policy context, revealing how risk emerges from surreptitious healthcare practices aimed at evading state regulation. His findings illuminated how injustice and healthcare inequity against certain social groups become concealed within institutionalised healthcare practice and are normalised by legal and normative frameworks that mediate health policy directions.

He is also engaged in a project examining the influence and politics of absence in global health and postdoctoral training in Africa. This initiative highlights how global neoliberal frameworks foster a desire for symbolic dominance, create distance from local realities, and transform scholarship into a tool rather than a means of genuine expression of experiences. The project also reveals how colonial legacies persist, hindering the authentic articulation of African identity.

Prior to doctoral training and postdoctoral research, Alexander served as an assistant lecturer in the sociology of technology at Makerere University's College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology (CEDAT). He also served as a postgraduate Research Fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), had teaching responsibilities in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Makerere University (2009-2011), and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Gothenburg School of Public Health and Community Medicine (2022-2023).