Imagining ‘Atlanta’: The Cultural Politics and Poetics of Experimental Medicine in East Africa
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
In East Africa there is a field research station that locals call ‘Atlanta.’ It sits on the outskirts of a rural town, near Lake Victoria, equipped with ‘state-of-the-art’ biotechnological and entomological equipment for monitoring and exploring malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, rotavirus, and other tropical diseases. Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork with clinical trials in East Africa, this paper considers the stories people tell about the landscapes and spaces of experimental medicine to explore the uneven movement of knowledge, scientific practices, and scientists in global medicine. I begin this analytical journey at ‘Atlanta’ to consider what local idioms about such places might tell us about the encounters and travels of science and scientists in East Africa. Last, I draw attention to the social and material effects of global science projects on the lives and landscapes of East Africa.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed undera Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c) Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Open Access Citation Advantage Service). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (ie. a copy of a work which has been published in a UTS ePRESS journal, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the UTS ePRESS publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.
d) Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.