Lecture
Testing, Testing: The Social Lives of Rapid Diagnostic Devices
- Prof. Dr. Susan Reynolds Whyte
- Date
- Wednesday 15 February 2017
- Time
- Location
-
Anna van Buerenplein
Anna van Buerenplein 301
2595 DG The Hague - Room
- Auditorium
Do you want to know if you are pregnant or infected with malaria or hepatitis B? A quick answer is at hand. A new era in popular biomedical care in Africa has opened with the spread of user-friendly testing devices to drug shops, clinics, homes and schools. The lecture will outline this development as a further phase in the popularization of pharmaceuticals, whose study Sjaak van der Geest pioneered. It will discuss some of the possibilities for commerce and surveillance that the spread of rapid diagnostic tests has brought in Uganda
Prof. Dr. Susan Reynolds Whyte is a leading scholar in the field of medical anthropology.
In her work she is concerned with attempts by persons and societies to secure well-being, with all the contradictions and uncertainties that entails. She has worked on the management of misfortune; the social lives of pharmaceuticals and the management of chronic conditions, globalization and the movement of ideas, discourses and commodities in the field of disability and global health technology, relations between generations, and changing human security in the face of transformative historical events such as the AIDS epidemic and armed conflict in Africa.
She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda (Editor), Generations in Africa : Connections and Conflicts (Editor), Disability in Local and Global Worlds (Editor), The social lives of medicines (Editor) and Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda.