Medicine Anthropology Theory
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The protected lab: Securitization and spaces of exclusion in medical research in East Africa
Get PDFThis visual essay considers the links between medical research and securitization, and asks how they reconfigure local landscapes in East Africa. Humanitarian aid, including global medicine, has emerged as a ‘military therapeutic complex’, especially in African nations where the HIV/AIDS epidemic has drawn enormous contributions from states and transnational NGOs (Nguyen 2009; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). One unintended effect of this therapeutic assemblage is a concern with security, particularly for US state institutions conducting research or providing treatment. US research facilities and laboratories are fenced, with access mediated by security guards and locked gates. State actors working overseas live in approved housing, bound by a complex set of regulations about safety and security. This essay and photographs reflect the ways in which physical structures transform local landscapes as part of the global health industrial complex and raise a number of questions about the politics of spaces, both private and public, in humanitarian projects
How did we get here? ‘It does not require a big brain to understand.’: The ‘Greek Crisis’, care, and health care
Get PDFThe economic crisis in Greece, which officially showed itself in 2008, is blamed for a wide variety of negative changes in the country’s social, political, and moral fabric. Health care – and the deficits of a medical system already under stress even before the crisis – are particularly central in public complaint and political debate. Issues of community and family care have emerged with a strength that challenges the conventions of earlier generations. This essay shifts the gaze away from the well-documented indictments of the deficiencies of the Greek health care system to look at the ways in which families and communities are working to provide care within the changing landscape
