Anthropology in Global Health Trials- Lecture

Anita HardonAnita Hardon is Professor of Anthropology of Health and Social Care, Director of the research priority area Social Science and Global Health, and co-Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at the

UniUniversity of Amsterdam. She specializes in multi-sited studies of global health

technologies, combining ethnography with methods from other disciplines,

including epidemiology, and more recently digital humanities. Her studies have

ccontributed to a biosocial framework for understanding how the symbolic and

social effects of drugs interact with their biomedical effects in everyday life, published in the The Social Lives of 

MMedicines (2002). Her research in the eld of AIDS has generated new insights on

how poverty and hunger hinders access to life-saving AIDS medicines, and how social forms travel with medical technologies to

diverse settings, changing care arrangements in situ.

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard to evaluate and generalize the efficacy of global health interventions across diverse socisocio-cultural contexts. Social scientists have criticized these trials for ignoring the social and infrastructural conditions that impinge on how technologies work, and for their optimistic belief in generalizability. What if contexts interact with technologies and with people adminisadministering and using them, thus upending easy hopes that we can simply scale up and generalize results validated under specic socio-cultural conditions? Over the past two decadedecades, anthropologists at the University of Amsterdam have participated in global heath trials to replace the testing-machine model with a more open-ended, exible and iterative approach. This incorporates biosocial understanding thunderstanding that emerges during the trials, and contributes to more context-sensitive global heath technologies. 

Co-Sponsored by the Duke Global Health Institute

TuesdayOct. 184:15-5:45PMTrent HallRoom 124