Countries in sub-Saharan Africa were once dismissed
by Western experts as being too poor and chaotic to
benefit from the antiretroviral drugs that transformed
the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Europe.
Today, however, the region is courted by some of the
most prestigious research universities in the world as
they search for resource-poor hospitals in which to base
their international HIV research and global health
programs. In Scrambling for Africa, Johanna Tayloe Crane
reveals how, in the space of merely a decade, Africa
went from being a continent largely excluded from
advancements in HIV medicine to an area of central
concern and knowledge production within the increasingly
popular field of global health science.Drawing on
research conducted in the U.S. and Uganda during the
mid-2000s, Crane provides a fascinating ethnographic
account of the transnational flow of knowledge,
politics, and research money as well as blood samples,
viruses, and drugs. She takes readers to underfunded
Ugandan HIV clinics as well as to laboratories and
conference rooms in wealthy American cities like San
Francisco and Seattle where American and Ugandan experts
struggle to forge shared knowledge about the AIDS
epidemic. The resulting uncomfortable mix of preventable
suffering, humanitarian sentiment, and scientific
ambition shows how global health research partnerships
may paradoxically benefit from the very inequalities
they aspire to redress. A work of outstanding
interdisciplinary scholarship, Scrambling for Africa
will be of interest to audiences in anthropology,
science and technology studies, African studies, and the
medical humanities.'' |
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