Imagining ‘Atlanta’: The Cultural Politics and Poetics of Experimental Medicine in East Africa

Denielle Elliott

doi:10.5130/csr.v20i1.2659

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.

Highlights

Staff members working on AIDS prevention clinical trials in East Africa meet weekly to discuss the status of the trials and give updates on their participants
I was attending such a meeting in Kisumu, Kenya, in 2007 when one of the team members abruptly stopped the flow of the AOBs when she inquired about the possibility of buying a baby coffin for an infant enrolled in the study who had died.[1]
HIV/AIDS prevention trials, whether for male circumcision, microbicides, pre-‐exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) or vaccines, are for the most part not funded by industry but instead are funded and run by large state-‐like NGOs, such as Family Health International or philanthropy-‐based organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or state-‐funding agencies like National Institutes for Health (NIH) in the United States, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) or the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.[45]

Summary

Introduction

Staff members working on AIDS prevention clinical trials in East Africa meet weekly to discuss the status of the trials and give updates on their participants. I begin this analytical journey at Atlanta to consider what local idioms of places might tell us about the encounters and travels of scientific artefacts and scientists in East Africa.[5] How are such exclusionary spaces produced by global health research?

Results

Conclusion