Please join us on Monday, February 23rd:
STS Colloquium
AIDS and its Futures: Drugs, Clinical Trials, and US Foreign Policy
to Nigeria
Kristin Peterson, University of California, Irvine
4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to situate AIDS policies within a broader
political economy that is germane to Nigeria and indeed much of
Africa. It begins by discussing the general pharmaceutical landscape
since the 1980s, which was shaped by several forces including the
1986 IMF Structural Adjustment Program that disabled, if not
dismantled, state and private sector drug and health
institutions. Less than fifteen years later, the end of military
rule converged with a previously ignored and burgeoning AIDS crisis.
New international humanitarian agendas began constructing activist
sensibilities/subjectivities via massive amounts of new funding
injected into an ever-expanding AIDS NGO industry that would educate
the masses on HIV transmission As such, the state, its corporate
partners, its creditors, as well as "civil society" have been drawn
into completely new relationships since the pro-democracy movement of
the 1990s. These new assemblages emerge at a peculiar moment where
demands for HIV treatment were recently and tentatively met by the
U.S. President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) - a
policy that has constructed an entirely new notion of
humanitarianism. Specifically, the paper examines how seemingly
disparate events and activities such as human trafficking into
prostitution, HIV related clinical trials, and US foreign health and
security policy to Nigeria are all brought together by the same
funding mechanisms. At the same, 200,000 people are receiving
anti-retroviral care, in a largely privately and outsourced system of
distribution. The paper concludes by thinking about the prospects of
AIDS and its futures under a new Obama administration.
Bio:
Kris Peterson is a cultural anthropologist whose research and
teaching interests focus on international political economy,
policy-making, intellectual property law, and science, health, and
medicine. Through the lens of HIV/AIDS politics, her work engages the
problem of "development" as a strategy and framework that is
intertwined with the restructuring of markets, ideas of state
legitimacy and the law, and re-imagined desires for, and practices
of, citizenship. These topical and theoretical concerns are grounded
in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nigeria; newer work is
beginning to extend to Malawi, Ghana, Cameroon, France, and the U.S.
She is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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