Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper centres on the roles and contributions of fieldworkers-local data-collectors in Global Health research in postcolonial contexts. It is informed by two separate ethnographies, conducted in two different East African biomedical research institutions. It discusses how common characterisations of fieldworkers as ‘low-skilled’ and ‘local’ make them attractive to research institutions in two important ways – as community-embedded data-collectors thus facilitating community participation and as being unlikely to fabricate data because they lack the skills to avoid detection. This paper questions these assumptions. It draws on Daston’s idea of the ‘scientific persona’ and Fanon’s concepts of mask-making to explore how fieldworkers construct identities and data within their liminal roles. Fieldworkers create particular pseudo-personae or masks for getting and staying employed. They dumb-down CVs and emphasise their similarities with community members in ways which are partially ‘real’ but also ‘fake’. These constructed identities provide fieldworkers with a persona that allows them to fabricate or modify data without raising suspicions. They frequently engage in practices known as ‘genuine fake’ data fabrication which is data perceived as factually correct and verifiable yet methodologically incorrect, hence it is real and fake in varying degrees. We understand the ‘pseudo’ as the blurry space between real and fake where fieldworkers construct their identities and data. Given the seemingly laudable aims of Global Health, we argue that fieldworkers’ masking and making up data signal the need for greater attention by those designing its research, to better understand and address why and how these practices unfold.
Highlights
The idea that science requires anything other than the cleverest mind is strange to many
We argue that characterisations of fieldworkers as ‘low-skilled’ and ‘local’ make them attractive to research institutions in two important ways – as communityembedded data-collectors and because they are not deemed clever enough to get away with fabricating data
Recognising that encounters between research institutions and the people they engage can yield multiple ‘pseudo phenomena’, here we focus on two, both centring on fieldworkers: the construction of particular personae or masks, which are partially authentic, for getting and staying employed, and the production of so-called ‘genuine fake’ data
Summary
The idea that science requires anything other than the cleverest mind is strange to many. We make use of David Harvey’s insights regarding neoliberal transformations in labour markets, which concentrate the benefits of labour to groups of ‘core workers’ while replaceable, poorly paid ‘peripheral’ workers face shrinking possibilities to surmount the socio-economic inequalities and inequities constraining them (Harvey, 1989; Kasmir & Carbonella, 2008) Given these tensions, we argue that crafting and wielding masks, and constructing ambiguity between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ – data and personae – constitute crucial strategies for fieldworkers when navigating quotidian demands in Global Health research (Crane, 2010). This paper is informed by two separate ethnographies on fieldworkers, conducted in two different East African biomedical research institutions between 2004 and 2009 Both ethnographies investigated data collection and its contextual influences in large-scale operations in malaria and HIV research, common themes only became apparent after their completion The research findings were fed back and verified at each location
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