Across the African continent, the disease “epidemic” has been an influential organizing construct within everyday life, both historically and today. Epidemics and their associated transnational global health assemblages converge with local systems of meaning to produce novel therapeutic subjectivities and embodied experiences of health (Nguyen 2010; Crane 2013; Packard 2016). The faulty progressive logic of epidemiological transitions obscures the complex realities of everyday life and health in African nations (Livingston 2012). And in some places, the technoscientific creation of epidemiological “emergencies” has caused global health regimes to emerge as a formidable form of state-sanctioned biopower (Kenworthy 2017).
In this panel, we will explore the legacies of local epidemiological histories on the African continent and examine the lives that emerge during and after the epidemic. By what technoscientific, economic, and political processes have African epidemics been made legible? How have global health assemblages and pharmaceutical industries reimagined some African bodies and health realities, while altogether erasing others? How have African medical systems and locally significant modalities of care evolved or emerged in the wake of epidemics?
This panel is seeking 3-4 presenters and a discussant. Original ethnographic papers, historiographical essays, STS analyses, and methodological interventions are welcome. I will contribute an anthropological research paper on the subjectification of maternal Basotho bodies, as the perceived source of infectious threat and desired site of epidemiological intervention in modern-day Lesotho.
If you would like to join the panel, please contact Mary Beth Knipper directly at mary.e.knipper@gmail.com by March 14th. In your message, please include your: name, email, institutional affiliation, paper title, and an abstract (max 200 words). I will respond to potential panelists by March 15th and submit the panel proposal by March 17th.
Note: All potential panelists must pre-register for the ASA annual meeting prior to March 17th.
