Bent Steenberg

Dr Steenberg is a medical anthropologist and public healthcare specialist. He explores social aspects of African healthcare such as structural violence, stigma, vaccine acceptability, disclosure, sexualities, and care-seeking behaviour. Spending most of his twenties in Brazil enabled him to undertake extensive fieldwork in Mozambican and later South African HIV clinics and hospitals, applying an ethnographic research approach based on life-history interviews. After six years as a post-doctoral researcher with the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, he is presently with Baragwanath Academic Hospital in Soweto and jointly appointed as lecturer at Wits School of Clinical Medicine — working mostly with vaccines and infectious diseases, particularly COVID–19 immunization programmes and HIV care. As a pastime, he tinkers with an ethnograhic documentary film about HIV activism in Africa.