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Please join us on <b>Monday, February 23rd:<br><br>
<div align="center">STS Colloquium <br><br>
<font size=4 color="#0000FF">AIDS and its Futures: Drugs, Clinical
Trials, and US Foreign Policy to Nigeria<br><br>
</font><font size=4>Kristin Peterson, University of California,
Irvine<br><br>
4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095<br><br>
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Abstract: <br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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<b>Bio:<br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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