Culture and experiences of illness
How do people make sense of illness? Family knowledge, values and lived experiences help shape pathways to care.
Health anthropology · Public health
Health, at the meeting point of cultures and social relationships.
Ousseni Sawadogo
A medical graduate and doctoral student in anthropology at Université Laval, I am interested in how people understand illness, experience care and develop trust.
Medicine · Anthropology · Public healthInfectious diseases and antimicrobial resistanceCulture, social relationships and trustData and digital health
01 / An anthropological perspective
Health practices have a history and a context.
Understanding a health decision requires attention to knowledge, values and beliefs, alongside living conditions, resources and experiences of care. My interests also extend to the professional cultures of medicine, laboratories and health institutions.
Social relationships and health practices
Health decisions take shape within families, everyday settings and encounters with care providers. Resources and access to care also matter.
Trust and institutions
How is trust built in a professional, a recommendation or an institution? Experiences of care and relationships between people are central to these questions.
02 / Doctoral research
Doctoral project in development · Working title
Making resistance governable
Infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance
My doctoral project aims to understand how knowledge about antimicrobial resistance circulates between laboratories, surveillance and care settings in Québec. It examines how this knowledge is interpreted, the relationships of trust involved and the constraints affecting its use.
I seek to understand how laboratory results, surveillance data and recommendations become decisions and practices, or fail to do so. Relationships of trust and professional contexts are an important part of this inquiry.
Read the doctoral project ↗03 / Perspectives
Digital tools also reshape relationships of care.
My programming and data analysis skills inform my interest in digital health. I want to explore how these tools are used, their place in everyday life and their implications for trust and access to care.
Explore this interest ↗04 / Completed work
Medical degree thesis · 2025Acute pericarditis in Ouagadougou
Medical degree thesis on acute pericarditis, defended at Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo on July 14, 2025.
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