Dr Patricia Henderson studied anthropology at the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Cape Town, and was offered a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She has conducted ethnographic research in Botswana and in Limpopo Province; New Crossroads, Cape Town and Okhahlamba, KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Having taught anthropology at the Universities of Cape Town, Johns Hopkins and Stellenbosch, she now teaches at Rhodes University. Her fields of interest include anthropological approaches to the study of children and youth, medicine and healing, gender and sexuality, and creativity and performance. The theoretical and philosophical approaches that inform her work include phenomenology, the anthropology of the senses, theories of embodiment, and the examination of language and silence in the face of the exigencies of everyday life. She is interested in how sociality within the context of inequalities and oppressions is formed, unravelled, reformed and transcended.

Medical anthropology; anthropology of creativity and performance; gender and sexuality; childhood and youth studies; anthropology of the senses.