Download or read book Rethinking Biomedicine and Governance in Africa written by P. Wenzel Geißler and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the domain of health, the relation between bodies, citizenship, nations and governments has changed beyond recognition over the past four decades, especially in Africa. In many regions, populations are now faced with a total lack of medical care, and the disciplinary regimes of modernity are faint memories. In this situation, new critical insights beyond the critique of old »modernization« and the »disciplinary regimes« of imperial times are needed. How can we keep up our sophisticated criticism of knowledge regimes and our doubts with regard to narratives of development, when so many people in Africa are dreaming about modernity and are envisioning their own renaissance?
Download or read book Rethinking Biomedicine and Governance in Africa written by P. Wenzel Geißler and published by Transcript Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[B]ased on a workshop organised by the research group Law Organisation Science and Technology (LOST), and held at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany, in June 2009"--P. [7].
Download or read book Documenting Death written by Adrienne E. Strong and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.
Download or read book Public Health at the Border of Zimbabwe and Mozambique 1890 1940 written by Francis Dube and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first major work to explore the utility of the border as a theoretical, methodological, and interpretive construct for understanding colonial public health by considering African experiences in the Zimbabwe-Mozambique borderland. It examines the impact of colonial public health measures such as medical examinations/inspections, vaccinations, and border surveillance on African villagers in this borderland. The book asks whether the conjunction of a particular colonized society, a distinctive kind of colonialism, and a particular territorial border generated reluctance to embrace public health because of certain colonial circumstances which impeded the acceptance of therapeutic alternatives that were embraced by colonized people elsewhere. It asks historians to look elsewhere for similar kinds of histories involving racialized application of public health policies in colonial borderlands.
Download or read book Making Spaces through Infrastructure written by Marian Burchardt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infrastructures are fundamental means through which societies create spaces, but little is known about the precise ways in which this occurs. How have infrastructures animated certain understandings of space? How do infrastructures stabilize, or undermine, the spatial formats in which we live, which shape our everyday practices and which regulate access to services and resources? And, conversely, how do spaces frame the ways infrastructural provision is organized? How do existing spaces shape infrastructural development and the scope and forms of access to vital services such as transport and water? In this volume, historians and sociologists draw on a range of fascinating case studies and provide compelling answers to these questions. Exploring, among others, the provision of irrigation water in nineteenth-century Los Angeles, the invention of airport transit zones, and the infrastructural practices of homeless people in Berlin, the book demonstrates how the making of spaces through infrastructure is deeply political. Intent on revealing uneven geographies of provision and hierarchies of access, the contributors highlight how infrastructures are products of global entanglements.
Download or read book Protecting the human rights of sexual minorities in contemporary Africa written by Ivy Nyarango and published by PULP. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Volunteer Economies written by Ruth Prince and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the increasing significance of the volunteer and volunteerism in African societies, and their societal impact within precarious economies in a period of massive unemployment and faltering trajectories of social mobility.
Download or read book The World of Indicators written by Richard Rottenburg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance.
Download or read book Fierce Medicines Fragile Socialities written by Dominik Mattes and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Tanga, a city on the Tanzanian Swahili coast, Dominik Mattes examines the implementation of antiretroviral HIV-treatment (ART) in the area, exploring the manifold infrastructural and social fragilities of treatment provision in public HIV clinics as well as patients’ multi-layered struggles of coming to terms with ART in their everyday lives. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book shows that, notwithstanding the massive rollout of ART, providing treatment and living a life with HIV in settings like Tanga continue to entail social, economic, and moral challenges and long-term uncertainties, which contradict the global rhetoric of the “normalization of HIV”.
Download or read book The Idea of Development in Africa written by Corrie Decker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging history of how the idea of development has shaped Africa's past and present encounters with the West.
Download or read book Emerging Orders in the Sudans written by Sandra Calkins and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the emergent character of social orders in Sudan and South Sudan. It provides vivid insights into multitudes of ordering practices and their complex negotiation. Recurring patterns of exclusion and ongoing struggles to reconfigure disadvantaged positions are investigated as are shifting borders, changing alliances and relationships with land and language. The book takes a careful and close look at institutional arrangements that shape everyday life in the Sudans, probing how social forms have persisted or changed. It proposes reading the post-colonial history of the Sudans as a continuous struggle to find institutional orders valid for all citizens. The separation of Sudan and South Sudan in 2011 has not solved this dilemma. Exclusionary and exploitative practices endure and inhibit the rule of law, distributive justice, political participation and functioning infrastructure. Analyses of historical records and recent ethnographic data assembled here show that orders do not result directly from intended courses of action, planning and orchestration but from contingently emerging patterns. The studies included look beyond dominant elites caught in violent fights for powers, cycles of civil war and fragile peace agreements to explore a broad range of social formations, some of which may have the potential to glue people and things together in peaceful co-existence, while others give way to new violence.
Download or read book Health in a Fragile State written by John M. Janzen and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Para States and Medical Science written by Paul Wenzel Geissler and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or responsive, national governments remain crucial in medical care, both as employers of health care professionals and as sources of regulation, access, and – albeit sometimes counterintuitively - trust for their people. “The state” has morphed into the “para-state” — not a monolithic and predictable source of sovereignty and governance, but a shifting, and at times ephemeral, figure. Tracing the emergence of the “global health” paradigm in Africa in the treatment of HIV, malaria, and leprosy, this book challenges familiar notions of African statehood as weak or illegitimate by elaborating complex new frameworks of governmentality that can be simultaneously functioning and dysfunctional. Contributors. Uli Beisel, Didier Fassin, P. Wenzel Geissler, Rene Gerrets, Ann Kelly, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, Lotte Meinert, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Branwyn Poleykett, Susan Reynolds Whyte
Download or read book Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs written by Joël Glasman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of humanity – both in the sense that they are narrow in what they compare, and that they set a low bar for satisfaction. The book argues that we cannot understand humanitarian governance if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: As a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a material apparatus, and as a set of standards. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from its emergence in the 1960s right through to the present day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for “evidence-based humanitarianism.” Finally, the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs has played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on field research on Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014–2016. This important historical inquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers with an interest in international history and development.
Download or read book Mistreated written by Nora Kenworthy and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly "scaled up" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts. In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014. This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.
Download or read book Speculative Markets written by Kristin Peterson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented account of the dynamics of Nigeria's pharmaceutical markets, Kristin Peterson connects multinational drug company policies, oil concerns, Nigerian political and economic transitions, the circulation of pharmaceuticals in the Global South, Wall Street machinations, and the needs and aspirations of individual Nigerians. Studying the pharmaceutical market in Lagos, Nigeria, she places local market social norms and credit and pricing practices in the broader context of regional, transnational, and global financial capital. Peterson explains how a significant and formerly profitable African pharmaceutical market collapsed in the face of U.S. monetary policies and neoliberal economic reforms, and she illuminates the relation between that collapse and the American turn to speculative capital during the 1980s. In the process, she reveals the mutual constitution of financial speculation in the drug industry and the structural adjustment plans that the IMF imposed on African nations. Her book is a sobering ethnographic analysis of the effects of speculation and "development" as they reverberate across markets and continents, and play out in everyday interpersonal transactions of the Lagos pharmaceutical market.
Download or read book Illicit Medicines in the Global South written by Mathieu Quet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-20 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates pharmaceutical regulation and the public health issue of fake or illicit medicines in developing countries. The book analyses the evolution of pharmaceutical capitalism, showing how the entanglement of market and health interests has come to shape global regulation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in India, Kenya, and Europe, it demonstrates how large pharmaceutical companies have used the fight against fake medicines to serve their strategic interests and protect their monopolies, sometimes to the detriment of access to medicines in developing countries. The book investigates how the contemporary dynamics of pharmaceutical power in global markets have gone on to shape societies locally, resulting in more security-oriented policies. These processes highlight the key consequences of contemporary "logistical regimes" for access to health. Providing important insights on how the flows of commodities, persons, and knowledge shape contemporary access to medicines in the developing countries, this book will be of considerable interest to policy makers and regulators, and to scholars and students across sociology, science and technology studies, global health, and development studies.
