[Sci-tech-public] STS Colloquium "AIDS and its Futures": Monday, February 23 @ 4:00 pm

[Debbie Meinbresse]

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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