Extension number: 8257


Josien de Klerk is a medical anthropologist and assistant professor at Leiden University College, The Hague. At LUC she teaches in the major Global Public Health. She is also a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD). Her research focuses on Global Public Health and International Development in sub-Saharan Africa. Topics of interest include ageing, chronic illness, HIV/AIDS, informal care, self-care, wellbeing and enhancement through the lens of kinship-studies and critical global health.

Josien obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2011. Her PhD and subsequent Post-Doctoral research centered around aging in the era of AIDS in Kenya and Tanzania, looking at informal care, including self-care, of both affected and infected older people in rural and urban settings. Her long-term ethnographic fieldwork is the basis of critical analysis of the politics around aging and care in the treatment-dominated AIDS landscape in East-Africa.

At the AIGHD Josien is the lead social scientist in an interdisciplinary project aiming to improve availability, access to and retention in HIV Care in rural Tanzania. This project amongst others pilots a model of decentralized HIV care. For more information see (2011, University of Amsterdam)Josien has alternated an academic career with applied research and project management for different NGOs, including Doctors without Borders. Her current research interests evolve around chronic illness and well-being across the life course in Eastern Africa and the Ageing body and the meaning of self-reliance in the context of changing welfare state policies in the Netherlands.