Domesticating Malaria Control: Making Healthy Homes with Insecticide-Treated Bed Nets in Kenya

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – II

Abstract

Insecticide-treated bed nets have become fixtures of domesticity in many rural, malaria-affected areas of Africa. For decades, this malaria prevention technology has been targeted toward mothers, deemed responsible not only for using the nets to protect themselves and their offspring, but also for washing, repairing, and maintaining nets. Due to recent mass distribution campaigns of free bed nets in countries such as Kenya, many families living in extreme poverty have increasingly included this object into their “household furniture” in the name of public health. Although malaria information and education campaigns have entered homes alongside this ubiquitous artifact, instances of people using bed nets to fence gardens, catch fish, cover outdoor latrines, and as a mat for drying maize abound—practices condemned by public health programmers as ‘misuse’. In this presentation, I use interviews and field work to understand the domestication of insecticide-treated nets in rural western Kenya. By attending to bed net users, and acts of ‘everyday innovation’ they undertake to meet a variety of social and economic needs (Mavhunga, 2014), this paper argues that rather than ‘misusing’, women in the region are employing treated nets to make healthy homes in ways unintended or unexpected by malaria control programmers. In reinterpreting these acts as “constitutive appropriation” of a humanitarian, public health object (Odumosu, 2017), I aim to center Kenyan women living in impoverished, rural areas as technological innovators and center maintenance of economic and food security as a primary aim of domestic health.

Author

• Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; University of California, Los Angeles