Gender, Language and Epistemicide in Reproductive Healthcare

Objective

Gender, language and epistemicide in reproductive healthcare (GENHEAL) investigates how linguistic and cultural practices shape the production, negotiation, or erasure of knowledge about women’s sexual and reproductive health in transcultural clinical encounters. Focusing on multilingual interactions in Nigerian clinics, the project examines how indigenous epistemologies of gender, childbirth, and healing intersect—and sometimes clash—with dominant biomedical paradigms under conditions of epistemic asymmetry. Grounded in translation studies and extended through feminist translation theory and interepistemic mediation, GENHEAL reframes translation as a practice of negotiating knowledge across unequal systems. The project applies a participatory, mixed-methods design that combines ethnographic methods with linguistic mapping and discourse analysis to capture communicative mismatches and sites of resilience in interactions between health workers, patients, and communities. GENHEAL advances a gender-sensitive epistemic translation model, contributing both to theory and to practice. It shows how systemic miscommunication can perpetuate epistemicide while also highlighting women’s agency and health workers’ adaptive strategies. By producing multilingual toolkits, participatory protocols, and policy briefs, the project delivers actionable resources for equitable health communication. A secondment at UNICEF Nigeria ensures applied impact, embedding co-created tools into practice while fostering EU–Africa cooperation, open science, and alignment with SDGs on gender, health, and inequality.