Prof. Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo

Short Bio

Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director, Centre for Language and Communication at the Technical University of Kenya. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Education from Kenyatta University; a Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics) from Kenyatta University; and a Doctor of Philosophy (magna cum laude) in African Linguistics from Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany. His research focuses on Multilingualism and Education, Urban Youth Language, Forensic Linguistics and English Language Teaching Health Communication. Previously, he served as a lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Department of English and Linguistics, Kenyatta University, Kenya; and as a Senior Lecturer and Chairman, Department of Language and Communication Studies, The Technical University of Kenya. He is both a consultant and practitioner of Science Communication with several local and international organizations such as United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); Commonwealth of Learning (CoL), Canada; and The Global Centre for Policy and Strategy (GLOCEPS. He is a member of Global Young Academy, The Africa Science Leadership Program. He is also the chairman of the Kenya DAAD Scholars Association (KDSA). He has published several articles in peer reviewed journals and authored a number of books.

Selected Publications

• Lost in Translation: Reporting About COVID-19 Pandemic by Community Vernacular Radio Stations in Rural Kenya L.A. Oloo, and O. Orwenjo:  COVID-19 and a World of Ad Hoc Geographies, 605-623
• (De) Constructing Corona: The Language of Conspiracy, Power and Indifference in Covid-19 Health Discourses A..H Tunde, and D.O. Orwenjo. LINCOM GmbH
• Beyond English: Multilingualism and Education in Kenya. Africa Education Review 18 (3-4), 1-30, 2021
• The Impact of Educational Innovation on Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices: The Case of the ORELT Project in Kenya. Africa Education Review, 1-32
• Breaking barriers: The recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya.F.K Erastus, O Orwenjo, M.N. Gathigia. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture, 347-361

Project Description

My study is titled: Waiting to Die: "The Discursive Construction of Competing Moralities in Illness Narratives in End-of-Life Care Contexts in Kenya". Broadly speaking, the proposed study concerns itself with two related questions: (1) the moralities behind the inherently 'heteroglossic' (Bakhtin 1981) Illness narratives associated with EoL care and (2) how these moralities are discursively embodied and enacted. Whenever people talk about health, they invariably draw on a wide range of different 'voices', the voices of doctors and other medical professionals, the voices of family members, the voices of traditional cultural models of health and risk, and the voices of various religious beliefs and practices. My  study seeks to provide a strategic window into how these voices enact moralities that ameliorate the disconcerting and traumatic effects of the contemplation of death both by patients and their loved ones. With regard to the second question, health discourses are almost always part of complex negotiations of power and expertise between people who have access to different kinds of discursive resources (such as doctors, patients and family members). How are the competing moralities in illness narratives discursively enacted and produced? How do they carry particular power relations thus making language to have an enduring influence on our view of death and dying (O'Connor, Davis, & Abernethy, 2010).? The proposed project adopts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach and Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) to analyze the illness narratives associated with EoLC. This is because discourse constructs social entities by words chosen and their shared meanings.