Cooking data : culture and politics in an African research world / Crystal Biruk.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Biruk, Crystal, author.

Series:

Critical global health

Critical global health: evidence, efficacy, ethnography

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical anthropology--Malawi.

Medical anthropology.

AIDS (Disease)--Research--Malawi--Methodology.

AIDS (Disease).

HIV infections--Research--Malawi--Methodology.

HIV infections.

HIV infections--Research.

Methodology.

AIDS (Disease)--Research.

Malawi.

Physical Description:

xiii, 277 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, the author shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always "cooked" during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationship among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, the author examines the ways in which unites of information - such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers - acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.

Contents:

The office in the field: building survey infrastructures

Living project to project: brokering local knowledge in the field

Clean data, messy gifts: soap-for-information transactions in the field

Materializing clean data in the field

When numbers travel: the politics of making evidence-based policy

Conclusion: Anthropology in and of (critical) global health.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Biruk, Crystal. Cooking data.

ISBN:

9780822370741

0822370743

9780822370895

0822370891

OCLC:

985874213