The Department of Anthropology would like to give a warm welcome to Kennedy Opande, PhD. He is a LA&PS postdoctoral fellow at York University, and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, which he earned in 2024. For his PhD, he conducted a study on anthropology of life under the title “Life and Land Configurations among the Luo of Western Kenya”. Anthropology of Life project, for which he is a team member, focuses on the representation of life in human societies. His research, therefore, explored the Luo people’s notion of the constitution of life, and more so how the concept of life interconnects with land. His current research examines how neuro-technologies are transformed in Kenya in a postcolonial context. This research combines the perspective of anthropology of life and what it is capable of bringing from the indigenous populations to the science and technology studies.
Dr. Opande has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Luo rice farmers in Kisumu, Kenya. More recently, he has undertaken fieldwork on a research about “Situated Neurology” spearheaded by Prof. Denielle Elliott, in which he conducted clinical observations across hospitals in Kisumu and Nairobi cities. Dr. Opande also has an interest in journalistic ethnographic writing, and the use of journalistic techniques in ethnographic practice. He has been published in international peer review journals – including Social Analysis, Cultural Anthropology among others. He is currently working on his first monograph.
If you would like to learn more about Dr. Opande's work, he will be presenting his scholarly paper "Anthropology of Life: Cosmo-juridical agency in Life Formation among the Luo of Kenya" on March 14th, 2025 from 1 pm to 4 pm in South Ross 802. The paper draws on ethnographic methods of in-depth interviews, participant observations and narrative conversations to provide a contextualized perspective of life among the Luo people in comparison to western and non-western societies. It aims to answer questions such as What are the principles of cosmo-juridical agency? What are the human-nonhuman practices that institute these principles, and hence constitute life? What lifeway do these practices reveal about life formation among the Luo?
