Dissertation Research: Institutional Innovation in a Malaria Control Partnership in Tanzania: an ethnographic study

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This is a Science and Technology Studies dissertation improvement grant. The researcher will examine the effects of changing dominant health development paradigms on international collaboration and knowledge production in the context of an innovative malaria control program in Tanzania. Funds from the grant will support travel to Tanzania. Funds will also support some equipment purchases. The focus of the project is an emergent institutional form loosely referred to as partnership, which is proliferating and transforming the field of international health. The project will shed light on the global forces that shape the organization and practice of international health research and disease control in developing countries; the intended and unintended changes that such interventions elicit both on the ground and within the wider development apparatus in which these are embedded; and the production of authoritative knowledge that is central to and constitutive of (biomedical) science and development as universalizing endeavors. Through its focus on partnerships as an increasingly influential yet poorly described organizational form, this project will also offer theoretical and methodological contributions for studying local instantiations of globalizing cultural phenomena. The project will also shed light on a neglected but devastating disease that is a leading killer of (poor) children and pregnant women. Malaria is the leading cause of death and illness in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, but little is known about the sociocultural meanings of this scourge or its social impact. By providing a situated perspective on how local people in Tanzania deal with malaria and respond to innovative institutional responses to control it, this project will also make important contributions to applied anthropology, health communication and most significantly, the development of culturally appropriate disease control programs.