James Wintrup

Medical anthropologist focusing on global health interventions, climate change, and chronic disease in Africa

James is the Principal Investigator of AHEAD: Assembling Health Knowledge in Zones of Environmental Harm and Chronic Disease, a Researcher Project for Early Career Scientists (FRIPRO) funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2026–2029). The project examines how communities in Zambia are responding to the rise of non-communicable diseases (such as cancer, kidney disease, and liver disease) in the context of climate change and pollution. Drawing on the experiences of local communities, health professionals, and activists, the research explores how situated forms of knowledge can inform new public and global health approaches.

James is also a researcher on the NORAD-funded project ARCS: Agricultural Resilience through Climate Services, a research and development project examining how new climate information services can support smallholder farmers in Ethiopia and Malawi as they adapt to climate change.

His previous research, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, examined the social and political effects of global health interventions. His book, Global health in fragments: saviourism, community, and experimentation in Zambia (Routledge, 2026), explores how competing and often contradictory narratives in global health have produced forms of fragmentation with profound everyday consequences for health workers, patients, and state institutions.

Before joining CMI in 2022, James was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo at the Institute of Health and Society. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2017.