Richard Oware PhD Candidate
Supervisor: Dr. Simonne HorwitzMy dissertation contributes to gender and medical history by exploring the historical factors that have shaped the lynching and accusations of older women in Ghana. By engaging a wide range of sources like colonial ordinances and missionary and anthropological discourses on witchcraft, this dissertation aims to examine how the historical evolution of the phenomenon has shaped the African understanding of mental diseases that affect older women. I am particularly interested in how witchcraft became a contested system of knowledge within the Ghanaian colonial space and how this has affected its connotations and meanings for contemporary discourses and policy directions on Aging and Population Health in Ghana.
Research Area(s)
- African History
- History of Madness and Psychiatry
- Witchcraft
- Ageing and Population Health
Dissertation Title:
Publications:
Adu-Gyamfi, Samuel, Richard Oware, and Dennis Baffour Awuah. "Interest groups, issue definition and the politics of traditional medicine in Ghana." Nordic Journal of African Studies 28, no. 4 (2019): 19-19
Adu-Gyamfi, Samuel, and Richard Oware. "Economy and Health in the Gold Coast, 1902–1957." African Economic History 47, no. 2 (2019): 12-44.
Adu-Gyamfi, Samuel, and Richard Oware. "Wesleyan Mission Medicine in Asante (1901-2000)." Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Studies (2018): 335-376.
Adu-Gyamfi, Samuel, Razak Mohammed Gyasi, Richard Oware and Godwin Adu-Agyeman. "Skin Bleaching Narratives Responses from Women Bleachers and Stakeholders in Ghana (1950s–2015)." Ethnologia Actualis 18, no. 2 (2019): 100-117.
Conference Presentations:
"Colonial Laws or Fears? Healing Insanity in an Anti-Witchcraft Ghana, 1920-1940." Manitoba, Ontario, Minnesota and Saskatchewan 8th Annual Medical History Conference, University of Saskatchewan, 2022.
"Margret Joyce Field and Colonial Psychiatry in Ghana." Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, Joint Annual Online Conference 2021.
"A comparative analysis of the Akwesasne and Mapuche Nations". Canadian Studies Undergraduate Conference. University of Toronto, Toronto ON, March 2019.