Crystal Biruk
Biographic Data
| ID | 3619296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Crystal Biruk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Crystal |
| FAMILY NAME | Biruk |
| SIGNATURE | BIRUK C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Oberlin College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
‘Covid containers’ in pandemic mediascapes: Discursive economies of health, bodies, and race in North America
Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to pandemic mediascapes, this article critically examines three media artifacts that assembled around COVID-19 - as an entity that is viral, social, and political - in the early months of the pandemic in North America. Focusing on the household, the cruise ship, and the body-with-underlying-conditions as 'COVID containers', the author argues that material and discursive responses to the pandemic, articulated t…
Cooking Data Culture and Politics in an African Research World
COOKING DATA is an ethnographic study of how demographic data is collected, handled, processed, and manipulated by fieldworkers, researchers, policymakers, and NGOs in Malawi and internationally. Crystal Biruk's fieldwork with people at all levels of major survey projects explores how survey-based research projects call truths about the populations they work with into being, transforming data from answers to survey questions into statistics that …
Cooking Data Culture and Politics in an African Research World: Culture and Politics in an African Research World
The office in the field: building survey infrastructures -- Living project to project: brokering local knowledge in the field -- Clean data, messy gifts: soap-for-information transactions in the field -- Materializing clean data in the field -- When numbers travel: the politics of making evidence-based policy -- Conclusion: Anthropology in and of (critical) global health
Community engagement in an economy of harms: Reflections from an LGBTI-rights NGO in Malawi
Drawing on our experiences as an anthropologist and a researcher-activist working with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights NGO in Malawi, this paper presents reflections on the ethics of engaging LGBTI-identified Malawians in research and other projects. While community engagement is normatively discussed as a tactic for creating meaningful dialogue and collaboration between researchers and the researched, this pape…
"Gay for Pay" in an Economy of Harms
Ethical Gifts: An Analysis of Soap-for-data Transactions in Malawian Survey Research Worlds
In 2008, thousands of Malawians received soap from an American research project as a gift for survey participation. Soap was deemed an ethical, non-coercive gift by researchers and ethics boards, but took on meanings that expressed recipients' grievances and aspirations. Research participants reframed soap and research benefits as "rights" they are entitled to, wages for "work," and a symbol of exploitation. Enlisting the perspectives of Malawi's…
Studying up in critical NGO studies today: Reflections on Critique and the Distribution of Interpretive Labour
Drawing on work with a human rights NGO in Malawi, this article considers the politics of anthropological knowledge production in Africa in the wake of Laura Nader’s classic essay. First, I briefly elaborate on the role of scalar metaphors (namely ‘studying up’) in the anthropologist’s toolkit, with special focus on how such metaphors might stabilize a normative mode of critique as negative orientation to objects of study. I then analyse two vign…
Aid for gays: The moral and the material in 'African homophobia' in post-2009 Malawi
In recent years, 'African homophobia' has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that 'homophobia' in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion…
Seeing Like a Research Project: Producing "High-Quality Data" in Aids Research in Malawi
Numbers are the primary way that we know about AIDS in Africa, yet their power and utility often obscure the conditions of their production. I show that quantification is very much a sociocultural process by focusing on everyday realities of making AIDS-related numbers in Malawi. “Seeing like a research project” implies systematically transforming social reality into data points and managing uncertainties inherent in numbers. Drawing on 20 months…
Books
How Older Adults Combine Medical and Experiential Notions of Depression
Past research has suggested that patients might not accept depression treatment in part because of differences between patient and doctor understandings of depression. In this article, we use a cultural models approach to explore how older adults incorporate clinical and experiential knowledge into their model of depression. We conducted semistructured interviews about depression with 19 patients aged 65 years and older who were identified by the…
Subjects, Participants, Collaborators’: Reading Community in Public Health Literature
Cooking Data Culture and Politics in an African Research World: Culture and Politics in an African Research World
The office in the field: building survey infrastructures -- Living project to project: brokering local knowledge in the field -- Clean data, messy gifts: soap-for-information transactions in the field -- Materializing clean data in the field -- When numbers travel: the politics of making evidence-based policy -- Conclusion: Anthropology in and of (critical) global health
Seeing Like a Research Project: Producing "High-Quality Data" in Aids Research in Malawi
Numbers are the primary way that we know about AIDS in Africa, yet their power and utility often obscure the conditions of their production. I show that quantification is very much a sociocultural process by focusing on everyday realities of making AIDS-related numbers in Malawi. “Seeing like a research project” implies systematically transforming social reality into data points and managing uncertainties inherent in numbers. Drawing on 20 months…
Aid for gays: The moral and the material in 'African homophobia' in post-2009 Malawi
In recent years, 'African homophobia' has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that 'homophobia' in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion…
Ethical Gifts: An Analysis of Soap-for-data Transactions in Malawian Survey Research Worlds
In 2008, thousands of Malawians received soap from an American research project as a gift for survey participation. Soap was deemed an ethical, non-coercive gift by researchers and ethics boards, but took on meanings that expressed recipients' grievances and aspirations. Research participants reframed soap and research benefits as "rights" they are entitled to, wages for "work," and a symbol of exploitation. Enlisting the perspectives of Malawi's…
Subjects, Participants, Collaborators’: Reading Community in Public Health Literature
Studying up in critical NGO studies today: Reflections on Critique and the Distribution of Interpretive Labour
Drawing on work with a human rights NGO in Malawi, this article considers the politics of anthropological knowledge production in Africa in the wake of Laura Nader’s classic essay. First, I briefly elaborate on the role of scalar metaphors (namely ‘studying up’) in the anthropologist’s toolkit, with special focus on how such metaphors might stabilize a normative mode of critique as negative orientation to objects of study. I then analyse two vign…
How Older Adults Combine Medical and Experiential Notions of Depression
Past research has suggested that patients might not accept depression treatment in part because of differences between patient and doctor understandings of depression. In this article, we use a cultural models approach to explore how older adults incorporate clinical and experiential knowledge into their model of depression. We conducted semistructured interviews about depression with 19 patients aged 65 years and older who were identified by the…
Subjects, Participants, Collaborators’: Reading Community in Public Health Literature
Books
Seeing Like a Research Project: Producing "High-Quality Data" in Aids Research in Malawi
Numbers are the primary way that we know about AIDS in Africa, yet their power and utility often obscure the conditions of their production. I show that quantification is very much a sociocultural process by focusing on everyday realities of making AIDS-related numbers in Malawi. “Seeing like a research project” implies systematically transforming social reality into data points and managing uncertainties inherent in numbers. Drawing on 20 months…
Aid for gays: The moral and the material in 'African homophobia' in post-2009 Malawi
In recent years, 'African homophobia' has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that 'homophobia' in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion…
Studying up in critical NGO studies today: Reflections on Critique and the Distribution of Interpretive Labour
Drawing on work with a human rights NGO in Malawi, this article considers the politics of anthropological knowledge production in Africa in the wake of Laura Nader’s classic essay. First, I briefly elaborate on the role of scalar metaphors (namely ‘studying up’) in the anthropologist’s toolkit, with special focus on how such metaphors might stabilize a normative mode of critique as negative orientation to objects of study. I then analyse two vign…
Community engagement in an economy of harms: Reflections from an LGBTI-rights NGO in Malawi
Drawing on our experiences as an anthropologist and a researcher-activist working with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights NGO in Malawi, this paper presents reflections on the ethics of engaging LGBTI-identified Malawians in research and other projects. While community engagement is normatively discussed as a tactic for creating meaningful dialogue and collaboration between researchers and the researched, this pape…
"Gay for Pay" in an Economy of Harms
Ethical Gifts: An Analysis of Soap-for-data Transactions in Malawian Survey Research Worlds
In 2008, thousands of Malawians received soap from an American research project as a gift for survey participation. Soap was deemed an ethical, non-coercive gift by researchers and ethics boards, but took on meanings that expressed recipients' grievances and aspirations. Research participants reframed soap and research benefits as "rights" they are entitled to, wages for "work," and a symbol of exploitation. Enlisting the perspectives of Malawi's…
Cooking Data Culture and Politics in an African Research World
COOKING DATA is an ethnographic study of how demographic data is collected, handled, processed, and manipulated by fieldworkers, researchers, policymakers, and NGOs in Malawi and internationally. Crystal Biruk's fieldwork with people at all levels of major survey projects explores how survey-based research projects call truths about the populations they work with into being, transforming data from answers to survey questions into statistics that …
Cooking Data Culture and Politics in an African Research World: Culture and Politics in an African Research World
The office in the field: building survey infrastructures -- Living project to project: brokering local knowledge in the field -- Clean data, messy gifts: soap-for-information transactions in the field -- Materializing clean data in the field -- When numbers travel: the politics of making evidence-based policy -- Conclusion: Anthropology in and of (critical) global health
‘Covid containers’ in pandemic mediascapes: Discursive economies of health, bodies, and race in North America
Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to pandemic mediascapes, this article critically examines three media artifacts that assembled around COVID-19 - as an entity that is viral, social, and political - in the early months of the pandemic in North America. Focusing on the household, the cruise ship, and the body-with-underlying-conditions as 'COVID containers', the author argues that material and discursive responses to the pandemic, articulated t…
Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · HIV/AIDS Research and Interventions (3 works) · Law (3 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (2 works)