Dr Serena Saligari

PhD (University of Liverpool)

Pronouns: She/her
  • STEER Research Associate
ORCiD
serena_saligari

Dr Serena Saligari is a social anthropologist with over five years’ experience conducting ethnographic and qualitative research on the politics and practices of energy transitions for health and gender equality in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For her doctoral studies, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork on household energy practices in Langas, an informal settlement of Kenya. Here, she explored the procurement and consumption of different sources of cooking energy to untie the socio-economic, cultural and structural contingencies informing the choices of cookstoves and fuels and the integration of clean energy technologies (LPG, electricity, ethanol) within households.

Prior to joining Loughborough University, she was Research Associate for the NIHR Global Health Research Unit CLEAN-Air(Africa) at the University of Liverpool, where she led qualitative research across multi-country studies in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania) and Cameroon. Her work focused on microfinance initiatives to support the adoption of clean household fuels, institutional transitions to clean energy in schools and the health burden of burns and scalds from cooking with polluting fuels. She also acted as Community Engagement and Involvement lead, designing and implementing a tailored strategy to promote the inclusion of  underrepresented groups in research and embed participatory methodologies across the programme.

She has been a longstanding member of CHASE (Centre for Health, Arts, Society and Environment) at the University of Liverpool and acted as a Pint of Science Event Coordinator for the University of Liverpool Public Engagement Office.

Her work has been recognised by the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews, where she received a People’s Poster Award during the 2023 Ethics Conference. Visual materials from her ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya were also awarded multiple prizes by the University of Liverpool’s Images of Research competitions.

Dr Serena Saligari's research interests include:

  • Air pollution, with a specific focus on household air pollution (HAP): local understanding, knowledge and management of air pollution, perceived effects on human health, the social dimensions of health and health inequalities, broader environmental contamination and impacts on multi-species.
  • Energy and gender: gendered division of household energy labour, gender agency in energy decision making, gender identities in relation to cooking and broader energy tasks.
  • Energy material culture: the design, materiality and cultural and symbolic significance of cookstoves and fuels, traditional knowledge about energy provision and consumption.
  • Translation of global energy narratives to local contexts: local reception, appropriation and interpretation of SDG7 discourses, frictions and contestations of SDG7.
  • Structural inequalities: the role of poverty, lack of public services, infrastructural failure and institutional neglect on planetary health and energy transitions capacity.
  • Global Public Health (GPH): the ontological and epistemological stance of GPH, what counts as a GPH problem, how is a GPH problem constructed and understood.

Methodologically, Dr Saligari is interested in:

  • Decolonial research methods that challenge extractive models of knowledge production and centre the voices, experiences, and knowledges of communities most affected by environmental, health and social inequalities.
  • Participatory Action Research and broader methodologies promoting inclusion of marginalised groups in research.
  • Intersectionality as both a theoretical lens and methodological commitment to understand how overlapping social categories (gender, class, age, geography) shape people's health, social inclusion and everyday practices in the context of energy access.
  • Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA) and Political-Economy, to understand health, illness and healthcare through the lens of power, inequality and structural violence.
  • Postcolonial Anthropology, to critically reflect on the discipline’s roots in colonial histories and power relations and undo the lingering effects of colonialism in both theory and practice.
  • Saligari, S., Nabukwangwa, W., Clayton, S., Nyongesa, M., Puzzolo, E., Anderson de Cuevas, R. Mwitari, J., Pope, D. Nix, E. Whose pollution, whose problem? Understanding perceptions of air pollution and implications for clean cooking (for health) in Nairobi schools. Health & Place. doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2024.103398
  • Saligari, S. Thinking Complex about Energy Transitions. Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science, 56. https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.56.CON1
  • Nix, E., Nabukwangwa, W., Mwitari, J., Lorenzetti, F., Gohole, A., Saligari, S., Shupler, M., Abbott, M., Rosa, G., Anderson de Cuevas, R. ‘This smoke will finish us’: impacts of cooking with polluting fuels on air quality, health and education in three schools in Nairobi, Kenya. Environmental Research Health 2 035003. doi:10.1088/2752-5309/ad4202.
  • Nix, E., Betang, E., Baame, M., Abbott, M., Saligari, S., Shupler, M., Čukić, I., et al. (2022). Complex dynamics in sustaining clean cooking and food access through a pandemic: A COVID-19 impact study in peri-urban Cameroon. Energy for Sustainable Development, 71: 167-75. doi:10.1016/j.esd.2022.09.017
  • Shupler, M., Menya, D., Sang, E., Anderson de Cuevas, R., Mang'eni, J., Lorenzetti, F., Saligari, S., et al. Widening inequities in clean cooking fuel use and food security: Compounding effects of COVID-19 restrictions and VAT on LPG in a Kenyan informal urban settlement. Environmental Research Letters, 17, 055012. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac6761.