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**AAA Panel - Drug Resistance
RESISTANT TO TREATMENT: drug-resistant disease as a medical, social, and
public health problem.
Co-organizers: Johanna Crane
Alex Choby
As pharmaceuticals evolve, so do diseases. One result of the global
proliferation of pharmaceutical therapies has been the emergence of
drug-resistant microbes: viruses and bacteria that have mutated to
render the drugs used to treat them ineffective. Theorists of social
suffering have focused on the interplay of poverty and pharmaceutical
access in contributing to epidemiological patterns and the future
specter of “super-bugs” (Paul Farmer). Policy-oriented anthropologists
have noted that local patterns for attributing meaning and efficacy to
pharmaceuticals have shaped differing consumption patterns that might
ultimately lead to resistance (e.g. Mark Nichter). And anthropologists
have recently begun to describe the off-shoring of clinical trials by
pharmaceutical companies in search of “treatment-naïve” research
subjects, untainted by previous exposure to drugs or the possibility of
drug resistance (Adriana Petryna). These works address the problem of
resistance as a consequence or cause of various social and political
practices. In this panel, we invite papers that seek to problematize the
concept of “ drug resistance”, as such. We take various historically and
culturally specific constructions of “resistance” as sites for thinking
through how power and knowledge remake the body and disease.
This AAA section will focus on the anthropology of drug resistance,
broadly conceived. Possible paper topics might include:
•Ethnographies of drug-resistant epidemics such as multi-drug resistant
tuberculosis (MDR-TB), drug-resistant malaria, or methicillin-resistant
staph aureus (MRSA).
•Iatrogenesis and the role of medicine in the production of drug
resistant disease.
•Social, economic, and technical elements that shape interactions
between the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and local
governments, around the production and management of resistance, both
globally and locally.
•The relationship between adherence (“compliance”) to treatment and the
development of drug resistance (including questions of risk, discipline,
and biopower in relation to patient behavior). The emergence,
reformulation, and politics of “local biologies” in the face of the
question of resistance.
•The construction of scientific knowledge about drug resistance: its
causes, definition, and consequences. What is resistance? What is
adherence? What are the social, technical, and political arrangements
through which resistance is “produced” and identified? How has the
concept emerged across disease categories? When, where and how have
these concepts (adherence, resistance) been standardized?
•Drug resistance and drug “refractoriness”in non-infectious diseases,
such as cancer or epilepsy. What are the social and political lives of
these concepts (refractoriness and resistance)? How and when have they
been made useful to each other?
Johanna Crane and Alex Choby are Ph.D. candidates in the UCSF/UC
Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology. Johanna Crane’s research
focuses on the production of knowledge about drug-resistant HIV in the
U.S. and in Uganda, and how Western fears of a drug-resistant epidemic
have impacted efforts to expand access to anti-HIV medications in
sub-Saharan Africa. Alex Choby’s research focuses on the role of
pharmaceuticals in the social construction of the category of
“refractory epilepsy”.
Please send abstracts to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] by
*March 20*.
Alexandra Choby and Johanna Crane
Joint Program in Medical Anthropology
UCSF/UC Berkeley
Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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