“There Would Be More Black Spaces”: Care/giving Cartographies during COVID‐19

Carney, Megan A.; Chess, Debi; Rascón-Canales, Michelle

doi:10.1111/maq.12732

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Still others have raised questions about the limitations of working within conventional systems of science and governance to achieve community health. Carney et al (2022) describe a coalition of academics and activists working in Tucson, Arizona, during the COVID-19 pandemic who are calling on the need to address anti-Blackness embedded within existing health systems. Activist Karen Washington has argued that when it comes to improving community health it is not a "seat at the table" that is needed but an abolitionist politics that upholds forms of nourishment not dictated by settler colonialism and slavery (Washington cited in Carney 2021).…”

Section: Interpositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Health Interventions: The Military, the Magic Bullet, the Deterministic Model—and Intervention Otherwise

Yates‐Doerr

Carruth

Lasco

et al. 2023

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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“Intervention” is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of “magic bullet” interventions arising from laboratory science, and studies of interventions based on deterministic modeling techniques. We then outline examples of “intervention otherwise,” in which people build relations of solidarity and care through global health programming, design interventions to be interactive and adaptable, and use data and modeling to support health justice. Whereas many global health interventions reproduce western power hierarchies, intervention otherwise draws attention to alternative forms of knowledge, action, and expertise. Our analysis of lively and multivalent practices of intervention has implications for debates about the im/possibility of decolonizing global health. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 52 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Section: Interpositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Health Interventions: The Military, the Magic Bullet, the Deterministic Model—and Intervention Otherwise

Yates‐Doerr

Carruth

Lasco

et al. 2023

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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“…The corresponding global health research increasingly treats such communities’ participation as a political imperative, but, crucially, not as an epistemological one (Biehl 2016). In this apparatus, the limited notion of science presumed in such interventions contributes to further entrenching biopolitical processes that leave racialized populations disproportionately vulnerable to disease and death (Carney, Chess, and Rascon–Canales 2022; Davis 2019; Mbembe 2017). The failure to apprehend the validity and value of embodied experimentations targets for destruction not only individual people but also their practices and the forms of life within which they are embedded (Stengers 2008).…”

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confidence: 99%

Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science

Meek

2023

Med Anthropol Q

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When I began fieldwork in Tanzania over a decade ago, I originally set out to observe the scientific practices through which counterfeit drugs were identified at a regional hospital in the Southern Highlands. 1 This hospital had a mini-lab for conducting a Thin-Layer Chromatographic (TLC) test, but for years lacked the iodine detection reagent needed to carry it out. Instead, I came to learn, science was happening elsewhere; not always in the laboratory or hospital, but-perhaps even more frequently-in drug shops, marketplaces, and homes. I encountered a kind of radical empiricism as my interlocutors tasted, smelled, felt, and consumed pharmaceuticals to test their qualities and discern which ones were chakachua (adulterated). Where institutionalized science has been systemically incapacitated by the logics of colonialism, neoliberalism and structural adjustment policies, debt and racial capitalism, these speculative practices are employed to enable knowledge of pharmaceutical efficacy. In this essay, I approach these embodied experiments as a form of fugitive science that also challenges the coloniality of contemporary global health and its "call to order" (Harney and Moten 2013: 131).Global health policy documents and news reports may give the impression that the category of "counterfeit drug" is rather straightforward. Such accounts provide seemingly self-evident figures like: "42% of detected cases" from 2013 to 2017 were in Africa (Cartwright and Baric 2018: 2) and "the proportion of fake pharmaceuticals in some countries can be as high as 70%" (Mwai 2020). Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) emphasizes the scale of this global health challenge, noting that: "data strongly suggest that the greater the efforts made to look for substandard and falsified medical products, the more of them are found" (WHO 2017: 12). But, subtending this framing lie assumptions about whose standards determine what is "false," "fake," or "substandard" to begin with. And, we might ask, what actually happens on the other side of this limit, as individuals engage these substances in their everyday lives? In Tanzania, I found that pharmacists routinely sell expired drugs and that some vendors also "play with" (kucheza na) the packaging of drugs; for instance, changing the listed country of origin in recognition of the fact that medicines from Europe can be sold for much more than their counterparts produced in the Global South. As these examples demonstrate, "falsified" pharmaceuticals are often partially or even wholly effective.Among my interlocutors, the Swahili neologism chakachua is used to refer to all such forms of adulteration. While other terms-like bandia and feki-translate more seamlessly into English as counterfeit and fake, the word chakachua is trickier. This term was coined during the 2010 national elections, in which much of the country argued that the results were rigged (or chakachua). My interlocuters define chakachua as "manipulation," explaining that it refers to any situation in which something's "real...

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