From Under the Wheels of the Juggernaut: Global Health Networks, Gold Standards and the Possibilities for Social Science Critique
From Under the Wheels of the Juggernaut: Global Health Networks, Gold Standards and the Possibilities for Social Science Critique
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来自主宰者的车轮下:全球卫生网络、黄金标准和社会科学批评的可能性
DOI:
10.1080/09505431.2016.1238889
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发表时间:
2016
影响因子:
2.6
通讯作者:
Holden K
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Holden K
While social scientists continue to query the concrete nature—or very existence—of global health (Brown et al., 2012; Fassin, 2012), the ever-multiplying conferences, journal titles, degree programmes, experts, policies and so on testify to its persistence as an enduring and dominant framework through which the everyday realities and vitality of world populations are known and intervened upon. Social scientists and humanities scholars have been at pains to critique the methods, epistemologies and effects of global health (Petryna, 2009; Biehl and Petryna, 2013; Mold and Reubi, 2013), and yet questions persist about the best ways to engage with its intricate machinery. The two monographs under review interrogate the seamless appearance of global health and its modes of biomedical knowledge production. The authors illustrate the complexities and tensions inherent in global health programmes and interventions, staying empirically close to practitioners and researchers working across intricate webs of internationally networked institutions, clinics and research centres. Crane’s book Scrambling for Africa attends to the architecture of global health and its administrative scaffolding. Crane refers to global health as a juggernaut (2013, p. 149), alluding to what often appears to be its unstoppable and irresistible force. Unstoppable because global health absorbs an ever-growing number of networked institutions, programmes, experts, and policies that extend its global reach and influence. Irresistible, because it attracts growing numbers of practitioners that are driven by humanitarian concerns, but arguably also by the availability of auspicious funding opportunities. And yet, the juggernaut metaphor implies that global health can be destructive; as both monographs under review caution, global health also erases, crushes, brushes aside forms of knowledge and ways of living that do not readily comply with its prevailing imperative for objective, measurable, and cost-effective solutions, and its overall mission to improve the health and wellbeing of world populations.Crane specifically draws our attention to the span of international collaborative networks and their implicit politics of exclusion. Exclusion is also the key concern of Michael and Rosengarten’s Innovation and Biomedicine, which analyses efforts to standardise biomedical tests and treatments according to internationally sanctioned ‘gold-standard’criteria, and the consequent tensions this creates for practitioners on the ground. While global health often takes on the appearance of an unstoppable ‘juggernaut’(Crane, p. 149), both books expose the tensions and contradictions involved in the spread of global scientific networks and setting of gold standards, and thus carve out new and innovative social science critiques.
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影响因子:
4.4
作者:
H. Tilley
通讯作者:
H. Tilley
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2013
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
M. Michael;M. Rosengarten
通讯作者:
M. Rosengarten
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2014
期刊:
影响因子:
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作者:
Monika Krause
通讯作者:
Monika Krause
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2013
期刊:
影响因子:
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作者:
D. Wylie
通讯作者:
D. Wylie
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2011
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
David Reubi
通讯作者:
David Reubi