James Wintrup

Medical anthropologist focusing on global health interventions, health systems, and politics.

James’s research has examined the social and political effects of global health interventions in Zambia. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, he has explored how people in rural Zambia – including health professionals, government officials, traditional healers, and patients – have understood and engaged with different health interventions over time. He has published articles on global health partnerships, randomised control trials (RCTs), community health worker (CHW) programmes, and the projects of Christian medical humanitarian organisations.

Before joining CMI, James was based at the Institute of Health and Society at the University of Oslo, where he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council (ERC) funded project, “Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa”. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. 

James is currently developing several collaborative research projects that will examine how past health interventions have produced distinctive challenges for present-day community health workers (CHWs) and that will explore how people navigate uncertainty about disease in epidemiologically complex settings shaped by climate change and environmental harm.