A Street
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 68129 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | A Street |
| NOMBRES | A |
| APELLIDO | Street |
| FIRMA | STREET A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7874-0234 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 246 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1970 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Tolerable Tests
The response to the 2014-2016 West African epidemic was a watershed for emergency research and innovation, forcing a shift in regulatory norms as evidentiary standards were pitted against humanitarian imperatives and biosecurity concerns. This article examines how those ethical and epistemic negotiations unfolded in practice through the development, testing, and use of novel tools for Ebola diagnosis with a focus on Sierra Leone. We track the pri…
Situational analysis of pesticide poisoning and perceptions of autoinjector devices in rural communities in Sri Lanka – a study protocol
Intentional and unintentional pesticide poisoning is an important public health problem, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Individuals who have been exposed to toxic pesticides, particularly organophosphorus insecticides, need early treatment. Atropine autoinjector devices offer a potential solution, allowing storage of effective treatment near agricultural workers' fields and homes that could be reached within minutes by the worker…
The social lives of point-of-care tests in low- and middle-income countries
Point-of-care tests (POCTs) have become technological solutions for many global health challenges. This meta-ethnography examines what has been learned about the ‘social lives’ of POCTs from in-depth qualitative research, highlighting key social considerations for policymakers, funders, developers and users in the design, development and deployment of POCTs. We screened qualitative research examining POCTs in low- and middle-income countries and …
Equivocal diagnostics
What is a diagnostic test for? We might assume the answer to this question is straightforward. A good test would help identify what disease someone suffers from, assist health providers to determine the correct course of treatment and/or enable public health authorities to know and intervene in health at the level of the population. In this article, we show that what a specific diagnostic test is for, the value it holds for different actors, and …
Who We Test For
COVID-19 testing programs in the UK often called on people to test to "protect others." In this article we explore motivations to test and the relationships to "others" involved in an asymptomatic testing program at a Scottish university. We show that participants engaged with testing as a relational technology, through which they navigated multiple overlapping responsibilities to kin, colleagues, flatmates, strangers, and to more diffuse publics…
The “ready-to-hand” test
This article assesses the availability of essential diagnostic tests in primary health care facilities in two districts in Sierra Leone. In addition to evaluating whether a test is physically present at a facility, it extends the concept of availability to include whether equipment is functional and whether infrastructure, systems, personnel and resources are in place to allow a particular test to be “ready to hand”, that is, available for immedi…
Make me a test and I will save the world
What is deemed possible in the wake of failure? The global biotech industry's failure to develop affordable diagnostic devices for use in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has inspired a generation of humanitarian entrepreneurs to launch their own diagnostic start-up companies. This essay traces the rise and fall of one such start-up in Boston in the United States, Daktari, which developed a portable HIV testing device in the 2010s. I show…
Diagnostic waste
Waste management is notably absent from current discussions about efforts to improve access to diagnostics in low-and middle-income Countries (LMICs). Yet an increase in testing will inevitably lead to an increase in diagnostic waste, especially since many of the diagnostic tests designed for use in LMICs are single-use point-of-care tests. Diagnostic waste poses a threat to both human and environmental health. In this commentary we draw on our e…
Human preparedness
This paper examines health worker experiences in two areas of post-epidemic preparedness in Sierra Leone - vaccine trials and laboratory strengthening - to reflect on the place of people in current models of epidemic response. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with health workers in the aftermath of Ebola, it explores the hopes and expectations that interventions foster for frontline workers in under-resourced health systems, and de…
The hidden burden of medical testing
COVID-19 testing is experienced as a social process shaped by multiple relationships and ethical considerations. The full burden of testing should be considered in the design of future testing programmes
Responsibility, repair and care in Sierra Leone's health system
To Fail at Scale
English Abstract: Humanitarian entrepreneurs seek to do well and do good by developing goods and services that directly address the world's most intractable problems. In this article we explore the expectations built into two of their products: a point-of-care diagnostic device and a solar-powered lantern. We show how these objects materialise both a minimalist ethic of care and a maximalist commitment to universal access for health and energy. S…
Global Health, Accelerated
A new paradigm of emergency R&D has transformed global health. Beginning with the 2014–2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa, experimental product development has been propelled to the frontlines of outbreak response, radically compressing timelines and unsettling regulatory standards, biosecurity strategies and humanitarian protocols. This paper examines these emerging epistemic practices and ethical norms as they played out in the cr…
Patient Pathways and Diagnostic Value in Sierra Leone
What is the value of a diagnostic test? Most obviously for primary healthcare settings, laboratory tests can inform clinical decision making about treatment and patient management. Their predominant value in this context is therefore medical. But what about when that healthcare setting is chronically under-resourced, healthcare workers (including laboratory workers) are underpaid, and government supply chains fail to deliver basic laboratory supp…
Introduction
Introduction to the Special Issue on Diagnostics, Medical testing, and Value
A cross-sectional survey of practices and knowledge among antibiotic retailers in Nairobi, Kenya
BACKGROUND: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) driven by antibiotic consumption is a growing global health threat. However, data on antimicrobial consumption patterns in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is sparse. Here, we investigate the patterns of antibiotic sales in humans and livestock in urban Nairobi, Kenya, and evaluate the level of awareness and common behaviours related to antibiotic use and AMR amongst human and veterinary pharmaci…
The barriers to linkage and retention in care for women living with HIV in an high income setting where they comprise a minority group
Women comprise a minority population of individuals living with HIV in Australia, and are often poorly represented in research and clinical trials so their needs remain largely unknown. Data suggests that they are diagnosed later than men and start antiretroviral therapy at a lower CD4 cell count. This raises the question whether there are sex specific barriers to linkage and retention in care. This study analyzed 484 surveys received from clinic…
Ghostly Ethics
The hospital and the hospital
How does science make a home for itself in a public hospital? This article explores how scientists working in 'resource poor' contexts of global health negotiate relationships with their hosts, in this case the doctors, nurses and patients who already inhabit a provincial-level hospital. Taking its lead from recent works on science, ethics and development, this article seeks to 'provincialize the laboratory' by focussing on the scientific tropics…
Biomedicine in an Unstable Place
Food as pharma
This commentary sketches out the politics of the expansion of affordable, fast-moving nutraceutical products into rural India, with a focus on fortified foods and beverages. It examines the relationships between industry, government and humanitarian organisations that are being forged alongside the development of markets for nutraceuticals; the production of evidence and the harnessing of science to support nutraceutical companies' claims; the wa…
When comparison comes first
This think piece draws on experiences of fieldwork in a Papua New Guinean hospital to reflect on tensions between political engagement and 'deep' comparison in medical anthropology theory. The paper argues that, contrary to the assumptions implicit in recent critiques of 'suffering slot' anthropology, paying attention to the workings of power does not preclude ontological comparison. Through a comparison of the different kinds of visibility sough…
Social Theory after Strathern
Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern's work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern's writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles publis…
The Image after Strathern
Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions - made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions - are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertak…
Seen by the state
Drawing on ethnographic material from a government hospital in Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper examines the relationship between power and visibility in two kinds of bureaucratic practice: hospital managers’ performance of institutional ‘transparency’ and patients’ careful management of their government health documents. In both examples, people engage with bureaucratic and biomedical technologies of visibility to entice governing actors to se…
Affective Infrastructure
Hospitals are designed as spaces of improvement. Yet an accumulation of infrastructural projects can lead over time to the emergence of a layered landscape made up of multiple incongruous planned spaces. This article focuses on Madang General Hospital in Papua New Guinea as one example of such a landscape. Here, deteriorating colonial buildings jostle against new gleaming constructions built with donor funds. The layered effect of the postcolonia…
Seen by the state
Drawing on ethnographic material from a government hospital in Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper examines the relationship between power and visibility in two kinds of bureaucratic practice: hospital managers’ performance of institutional ‘transparency’ and patients’ careful management of their government health documents. In both examples, people engage with bureaucratic and biomedical technologies of visibility to entice governing actors to se…
Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid
This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a 'social good', that is cap…
Belief as relational action
This article draws on ethnographic analysis of Christianity in a Papua New Guinean hospital in order to develop a theory of belief as 'relational action'. It argues that patients' engagements with Christianity in the hospital derive from a concern with medical efficacy rather than a search for meaning. Patients experience the hospital as a space of stasis in which they are unable to establish relationships effectively with either kin or doctors. …
Artefacts of not-knowing
Anthropological and STS scholars of biomedical work have traditionally explored contexts where inconsistencies and lacunas in diagnostic knowledge-production are problematic for medical practitioners, and such scholars have consequently focused on the social and political processes by which such epistemic uncertainties are resolved. This article draws on ethnographic material from a Papua New Guinean hospital where diagnostic uncertainty is not r…
Failed Recipients
Anthropologists studying voluntary-anonymous systems of blood donation have noted the ways in which they facilitate imaginings of national relatedness and integration. This paper focuses on family replacement systems in Papua New Guinea, where blood donated by a patient's relative replaces the units taken from the bank, in order to examine what kinds of relational imaginings are possible when blood is transacted between people who know one anothe…
Social Theory after Strathern
Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern's work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern's writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles publis…
To Fail at Scale
English Abstract: Humanitarian entrepreneurs seek to do well and do good by developing goods and services that directly address the world's most intractable problems. In this article we explore the expectations built into two of their products: a point-of-care diagnostic device and a solar-powered lantern. We show how these objects materialise both a minimalist ethic of care and a maximalist commitment to universal access for health and energy. S…
The Image after Strathern
Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions - made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions - are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertak…
Responsibility, repair and care in Sierra Leone's health system
Global Health, Accelerated
A new paradigm of emergency R&D has transformed global health. Beginning with the 2014–2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa, experimental product development has been propelled to the frontlines of outbreak response, radically compressing timelines and unsettling regulatory standards, biosecurity strategies and humanitarian protocols. This paper examines these emerging epistemic practices and ethical norms as they played out in the cr…
Introduction
Introduction to the Special Issue on Diagnostics, Medical testing, and Value
The hospital and the hospital
How does science make a home for itself in a public hospital? This article explores how scientists working in 'resource poor' contexts of global health negotiate relationships with their hosts, in this case the doctors, nurses and patients who already inhabit a provincial-level hospital. Taking its lead from recent works on science, ethics and development, this article seeks to 'provincialize the laboratory' by focussing on the scientific tropics…
Make me a test and I will save the world
What is deemed possible in the wake of failure? The global biotech industry's failure to develop affordable diagnostic devices for use in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has inspired a generation of humanitarian entrepreneurs to launch their own diagnostic start-up companies. This essay traces the rise and fall of one such start-up in Boston in the United States, Daktari, which developed a portable HIV testing device in the 2010s. I show…
Ghostly Ethics
Tolerable Tests
The response to the 2014-2016 West African epidemic was a watershed for emergency research and innovation, forcing a shift in regulatory norms as evidentiary standards were pitted against humanitarian imperatives and biosecurity concerns. This article examines how those ethical and epistemic negotiations unfolded in practice through the development, testing, and use of novel tools for Ebola diagnosis with a focus on Sierra Leone. We track the pri…
When comparison comes first
This think piece draws on experiences of fieldwork in a Papua New Guinean hospital to reflect on tensions between political engagement and 'deep' comparison in medical anthropology theory. The paper argues that, contrary to the assumptions implicit in recent critiques of 'suffering slot' anthropology, paying attention to the workings of power does not preclude ontological comparison. Through a comparison of the different kinds of visibility sough…
Anthropology Through Development
This special issue of Anthropology Matters frames the canonical question for development anthropologists in reverse. Instead of asking how anthropological theory might be put into practice in development, it asks how engagements with development policy and practice might transform anthropology. What kinds of theoretical insights have emerged from the anthropology of development? What does the overlapping language of anthropology and development m…
Failed Recipients
Anthropologists studying voluntary-anonymous systems of blood donation have noted the ways in which they facilitate imaginings of national relatedness and integration. This paper focuses on family replacement systems in Papua New Guinea, where blood donated by a patient's relative replaces the units taken from the bank, in order to examine what kinds of relational imaginings are possible when blood is transacted between people who know one anothe…
The collectors of lost souls
Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid
This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a 'social good', that is cap…
Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies
Belief as relational action
This article draws on ethnographic analysis of Christianity in a Papua New Guinean hospital in order to develop a theory of belief as 'relational action'. It argues that patients' engagements with Christianity in the hospital derive from a concern with medical efficacy rather than a search for meaning. Patients experience the hospital as a space of stasis in which they are unable to establish relationships effectively with either kin or doctors. …
Artefacts of not-knowing
Anthropological and STS scholars of biomedical work have traditionally explored contexts where inconsistencies and lacunas in diagnostic knowledge-production are problematic for medical practitioners, and such scholars have consequently focused on the social and political processes by which such epistemic uncertainties are resolved. This article draws on ethnographic material from a Papua New Guinean hospital where diagnostic uncertainty is not r…
Affective Infrastructure
Hospitals are designed as spaces of improvement. Yet an accumulation of infrastructural projects can lead over time to the emergence of a layered landscape made up of multiple incongruous planned spaces. This article focuses on Madang General Hospital in Papua New Guinea as one example of such a landscape. Here, deteriorating colonial buildings jostle against new gleaming constructions built with donor funds. The layered effect of the postcolonia…
Seen by the state
Drawing on ethnographic material from a government hospital in Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper examines the relationship between power and visibility in two kinds of bureaucratic practice: hospital managers’ performance of institutional ‘transparency’ and patients’ careful management of their government health documents. In both examples, people engage with bureaucratic and biomedical technologies of visibility to entice governing actors to se…
Biomedicine in an Unstable Place
Food as pharma
This commentary sketches out the politics of the expansion of affordable, fast-moving nutraceutical products into rural India, with a focus on fortified foods and beverages. It examines the relationships between industry, government and humanitarian organisations that are being forged alongside the development of markets for nutraceuticals; the production of evidence and the harnessing of science to support nutraceutical companies' claims; the wa…
When comparison comes first
This think piece draws on experiences of fieldwork in a Papua New Guinean hospital to reflect on tensions between political engagement and 'deep' comparison in medical anthropology theory. The paper argues that, contrary to the assumptions implicit in recent critiques of 'suffering slot' anthropology, paying attention to the workings of power does not preclude ontological comparison. Through a comparison of the different kinds of visibility sough…
Social Theory after Strathern
Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern's work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern's writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles publis…
The Image after Strathern
Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions - made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions - are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertak…
The hospital and the hospital
How does science make a home for itself in a public hospital? This article explores how scientists working in 'resource poor' contexts of global health negotiate relationships with their hosts, in this case the doctors, nurses and patients who already inhabit a provincial-level hospital. Taking its lead from recent works on science, ethics and development, this article seeks to 'provincialize the laboratory' by focussing on the scientific tropics…
Ghostly Ethics
A cross-sectional survey of practices and knowledge among antibiotic retailers in Nairobi, Kenya
BACKGROUND: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) driven by antibiotic consumption is a growing global health threat. However, data on antimicrobial consumption patterns in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is sparse. Here, we investigate the patterns of antibiotic sales in humans and livestock in urban Nairobi, Kenya, and evaluate the level of awareness and common behaviours related to antibiotic use and AMR amongst human and veterinary pharmaci…
The barriers to linkage and retention in care for women living with HIV in an high income setting where they comprise a minority group
Women comprise a minority population of individuals living with HIV in Australia, and are often poorly represented in research and clinical trials so their needs remain largely unknown. Data suggests that they are diagnosed later than men and start antiretroviral therapy at a lower CD4 cell count. This raises the question whether there are sex specific barriers to linkage and retention in care. This study analyzed 484 surveys received from clinic…
Patient Pathways and Diagnostic Value in Sierra Leone
What is the value of a diagnostic test? Most obviously for primary healthcare settings, laboratory tests can inform clinical decision making about treatment and patient management. Their predominant value in this context is therefore medical. But what about when that healthcare setting is chronically under-resourced, healthcare workers (including laboratory workers) are underpaid, and government supply chains fail to deliver basic laboratory supp…
Introduction
Introduction to the Special Issue on Diagnostics, Medical testing, and Value
Diagnostic waste
Waste management is notably absent from current discussions about efforts to improve access to diagnostics in low-and middle-income Countries (LMICs). Yet an increase in testing will inevitably lead to an increase in diagnostic waste, especially since many of the diagnostic tests designed for use in LMICs are single-use point-of-care tests. Diagnostic waste poses a threat to both human and environmental health. In this commentary we draw on our e…
Human preparedness
This paper examines health worker experiences in two areas of post-epidemic preparedness in Sierra Leone - vaccine trials and laboratory strengthening - to reflect on the place of people in current models of epidemic response. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with health workers in the aftermath of Ebola, it explores the hopes and expectations that interventions foster for frontline workers in under-resourced health systems, and de…
The hidden burden of medical testing
COVID-19 testing is experienced as a social process shaped by multiple relationships and ethical considerations. The full burden of testing should be considered in the design of future testing programmes
Responsibility, repair and care in Sierra Leone's health system
To Fail at Scale
English Abstract: Humanitarian entrepreneurs seek to do well and do good by developing goods and services that directly address the world's most intractable problems. In this article we explore the expectations built into two of their products: a point-of-care diagnostic device and a solar-powered lantern. We show how these objects materialise both a minimalist ethic of care and a maximalist commitment to universal access for health and energy. S…
Sociology (20 obras) · Medicine (17 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Anthropology (8 obras) · Economics (8 obras) · Geography (8 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras)