My research interests include: Medical anthropology and the anthropology of global health; science studies and the anthropology of knowledge and expertise; political anthropology, anthropology of the state, and anthropology of development; anthropology of the body and anthropology of reproduction; and social & cultural theory. Geographically, I'm interested in southern Africa, particularly Botswana and the northwest of South Africa.
I graduated with a B.A. in Critial Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College, a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts. Between 1998 and 2000, I worked at the Global Reproductive Health Forum, a reproductive health and reproductive rights internet project based at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 2000, I moved to the Republic of Togo, West Africa, and worked as a community health volunteer for the U.S. Peace Corps in the village of Kévé-Zogbépimé, near the Ghanaian border. Returning to the U.S. in 2001, I began my graduate studies in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2002.
Dissertation research: Botswana as a Living Experiment
If there is no question that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has touched
nearly
every aspect of society in Botswana, there can be little doubt that,
likewise, the treatment programs implemented to address the epidemic
have also far exceeded the boundaries of the clinic. Over the past
decade, as Botswana became a celebrated model in southern Africa and
beyond for managing its epidemic, American private foundations and
universities, attracted by the epidemic’s magnitude and by the
country’s success in providing treatment, have formed a number of
“public-private partnerships” to support the country’s treatment
program. Like the epidemic itself, the treatment program and the
partnerships that support it have reached far beyond the boundaries of
countries, such as Botswana, that bear the highest burden of the
disease, to transform the nature of “global health” interventions and
the transnational regimes of expertise that implement them. Like the
epidemic, too, the treatment program and the partnerships that support
it have set in motion more subtle transformations, both intended and
unintended, that reach far beyond the clinic walls.
Botswana as a Living Experiment offers an empirical investigation of the
institutions,
practices, and imaginaries glossed as “global health” in southeastern
Botswana, illuminating the interrelation between treatment provision,
knowledge production, subjectivity, expertise, value, and temporality.
I demonstrate how bodily interventions serve as sites for the
refashioning of subjects and the reordering of semiotic modalities,
forming the grounds for new forms of expertise and value and new ways
of producing futures. While “global health” has become a standard
feature of American medical school curricula and international
development agendas, I show how its seeming stability as a concept and
a field of practice emerges as shifting relations amongst states,
nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and philanthropists are
worked out at the level of individual bodies. Botswana’s treatment
program is an ideal site to examine how biopolitical orders become
intimately bound to particular forms of signification, value, and
expertise.
Keywords: global health, Botswana, HIV/AIDS, expertise, medical education, knowledge production, subjectivity, the body, futures
The abstract is available via ProQuest.
I conducted fieldwork in south-eastern Botswana in 2004 and between 2006 and 2008 supported by a U.S. Doctoral Dissertation Research Award (Fulbright-Hays) and an individual grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I have also received support in the form of an Unendowed University Fellowship from the University of Chicago, a Teaching & Research Grant from the University of Chicago's Social Sciences Collegiate Division, and a Watkins Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology. My supervisory committee consisted of Jean Comaroff (Chair), Judith Farquhar, Susan Gal, Joe Masco, and Mark Nichter.
Publications and manuscripts in preparation
Refereed(2011) “Not Here”: Making the Spaces and Subjects of “Global Health” in Botswana. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 35(2):285-312, DOI 10.1007/s11013-011-9209-z.
(nd) Review of Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. By Charles Piot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (forthcoming).
Non-Refereed
(2011) Review of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS. By Vinh-Kim Nguyen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Somatosphere
(2011) Review of Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS. By Frederick Klaits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Somatosphere
In preparation
(nd) Faith Healers and False Positives: Epistemological Experiments in Botswana’s AIDS Epidemic. (For a special issue on "Time, Place, and Uncertainty in Africa")
(nd) How to Do Things to Children with Words: Learning to Disclose in a Pediatric HIV Clinic in Botswana (in preparation for American Ethnologist)
Selected recent papers and presentations
| 2011 |
How to Do Things to Children with Words: Learning to Disclose in a
Pediatric HIV Clinic in Botswana. Emory University, April 27. |
| 2010 |
A Tempest in the Nescafe
Machine: Sovereignty, Philanthropy, and Citizenship in a Public-Private
Partnership. American Anthropological Association
Annual Meetings, New Orleans, LA, November 20. Direct Exposure: The Moral Aesthetics of the Global Health Experience. African Studies Workshop, University of Chicago, October 12; and Conference, “Culture and History in Eastern & Southern Africa,” University of Chicago, March 12, 2009. |
| 2009 |
The Proof is in the Pill Count? Adherence Assessments as Divinatory
Rituals at a Pediatric HIV Clinic in Botswana. Medicine, Practice &
the Body Workshop, University of Chicago, April 3. |
Teaching experience
Critical Perspectives on Global Health and Health Policy (with Joăo Biehl, Fall 2011, Princeton University)
This course introduces students
to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines
efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an
interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors,
institutions, practices, and forms of knowledge production at work in
the ‘global health system’ today, and explores the environmental,
social, political, and economic factors that shape patterns and
variations in disease and health across societies. We will
scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the
policy and science of global health and place present-day developments
in historical perspective.
The Ugly American Comes Home (co-taught with Dr. Martha Merritt,
Spring
2011, University of Chicago)
The aims of this course are to interrogate not only the experience
of studying abroad, but also the condition of coming “home” and facing
a range of needs to assimilate and articulate the experience. We
address being abroad and afterward through a range of reading
materials, including travel writings, philosophies of education, and
considerations of narrative and perception. Writing assignments will
explicitly address the challenge of integrating study abroad with other
forms of knowledge and experience that characterize collegiate
education.African Civilizations 2 / African Bodies: Medicine, Labor and Modernity (Winter 2011, University of Chicago)
This course is the second quarter in the African Civilization sequence. We use historical and ethnographic analyses of bodies and the politics of health and healing to explore central issues in African studies, including: the complicated and contradictory projects glossed by the term “colonialism”; Africans’ responses to colonialism, missionization, and incorporation into regimes of industrial labor and mass consumption; and the problem of “development” and “modernity” in colonial and post-colonial societies. The course is organized thematically but is meant to give students a sense of African bodies as the objects of moral and political contests over the longue durée. We focus largely on southern Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, with two or three major case studies, including: Zimbabwe; Zambia; and Botswana.
Reading Ethnographies: Global Health (Winter 2010, University of Chicago)
This course tracks the deployment of “global health” through contemporary ethnographies of medicine, science and public health. We begin with readings that help us analyze “global health” and its attendant practices, institutions, and terms of engaging the world. These readings help us place “global health” in historical context, and familiarize us with the tools scholars have used to analyze “global health.” In the second part of the course, our readings explore how illness, damaged bodies, and the tools and practises of care-giving are situated in multiple moral and political economies. The last part of the course explores the intended and unintended consequences of “global health” interventions as they engage with and transform these economies.
Self, Culture and Society (Winter 2009, University of Chicago)
This quarter focuses on the relation of culture, social life, and
history. On the basis of readings from Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins,
Foucault, Benjamin, Adorno, and other anthropologists and cultural
theorists, we investigate how systems of meaning expressed through
metaphors, symbols, rituals, and narratives constitute and articulate
individual and social experience across a range of societies, including
our own, and how those systems of meaning change historically.
Ongoing and future research
I have two ongoing writing projects. First, I am engaged in
revising my dissertation as a whole with an eye towards its publication
as a monograph. My second writing objective is to recast some
elements of my argument for submission as journal articles. To this
end, I have two article-length papers in preparation. The first uses
conversations about false-positive HIV tests in southeastern Botswana
to examine the ways in which biomedical processes of knowledge
production about HIV come to resemble occultpractices, complicating
the moral and epistemological distinctions biomedical institutions
attempt to draw between their practices and other forms of
intervention, including faith healing and witchcraft. The second paper
analyzes the way children attending an outpatient HIV pediatric clinic
learn to speak about their infections. My analysis reveals a
complicated set of interlocking unarticulated arguments about the
relationship between knowledge, speech, and action, the moral value of
revealing one’s interiority, and the specific qualities of pediatric
subjects.
While my dissertation research focused on the conceptual challenges presented by public-private partnerships, my future research program turns squarely to the problem of producing biomedical experts and expertise in the context of an increasingly, if unevenly, globalizing biomedical profession. Specifically, I plan to return to Botswana to conduct ethnographic research in the country’s new and only medical school. My research questions include: How do medical trainees in Botswana position themselves in a profession that has long looked upon Africans as objects of knowledge, rather than as knowledgeable subjects? How do they position themselves in a professional field increasingly attuned to “global” health? Through this research program, I intend to expand understandings of the mutual interpenetration of moral and pedagogical regimes, as well as the tensions between localized epistemic cultures and biomedicine’s universalistic claims.
Contact and CV
Email me at: bbbrada at gmail dot com.