Doctoral Dissertation Research: "Governing Global Health: The Politics of Knowledge and Governance in Global Tobacco Treaties"

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Katherine Kenny, doctoral student in Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, under the guidance of Professors Isaac Martin and Steven Epstein, will conduct research on the politics of knowledge and governance in international tobacco control and global health. In early 2005, the World Health Organization signed into force the world's first international treaty directed specifically towards a matter of health in the form of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). As such, the FCTC provides an excellent case through which to examine emergent forms of transnational governance and the co-production of the science and policy of public health on a global scale. This dissertation research, supported by the NSF Program on Science, Technology and Society, will address the following research questions: 1) How have the various problems associated with tobacco come to be seen as an issue of global significance? 2) How has international regulation, in the form of a legally binding, health related treaty, emerged as the best solution to the global tobacco problem? 3) How has the development of the FCTC contributed to and shaped the emerging field of "global health"? Drawing on a range of textual sources, data from participant observation and interviews with key actors, and using interpretive methods of analysis, this dissertation will employ the FCTC as a case study in the global governance of scientific knowledge. This research stands to make an important contribution to interdisciplinary studies of the relationship between science, society and the state by emphasizing the global and postcolonial contexts of the development of the FCTC and global health more generally. The results of this research will be of interest to scholars of science studies, social history, medicine and public policy, and social studies of governance, postcolonialism and globalization. Furthermore, this research will encourage collaboration between the critical social sciences and the rapidly proliferating field of global health.