REMINDER
***apologies for cross posting***
Please join us for the third of our LSHTM Medical Anthropology seminars this term
on Tuesday 19th March from 4-5pm in the Jenny Roberts room, LSHTM, Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9SH.
Medical Anthropology Research Seminar Series, Spring 2019
This lecture series is funded by the
LSHTM Anthropology and Sociology Hub
Tuesday 19th
March – Prof James Fairhead (University of Sussex)
‘Is the Ebola reservoir in people? A critique of the idea of 'Patient Zero' and 'spillover' in the narration and comparative analysis of Ebola epidemic origins, and its implications.’
4-5pm in the Jenny Roberts room, LSHTM, 15-17 Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9SH.
Abstract:
When epidemiologists trace the genealogy of infection back to the first documented (or ‘index’) case, they do not imagine their narrations are doing political work. And with new tools to help, such as ‘real-time’ sequencing and phylogenetic analysis, they might
imagine their task to be increasingly technical. Yet in situations where narratives of ‘origin’ segue into narratives of blame, as they often do in nightmare epidemics, is a new paradox emerging? As the identification of origins become increasingly technocratic,
so its findings become all the more socially contested. This paper probes this potential contradiction in relation to the identification of the ‘index case’ of Ebola in Meliandou; its closure on a child and Meliandou’s environment; the narrative structures
shaping this; the stigmatising effects, and the flawed and perhaps less-flawed narrations also produced locally. So whilst surveillance, rapid identification of index cases and ‘real time’ phylogenetic methods might be increasingly helpful in curtailing everyday
infections, might their regular but unintended effects amplify the very distrust and social contestation that can render nightmare epidemics increasingly intractable?
For more information please contact one of the organisers:
Annelieke Driessen ([log in to unmask])
Fred Martineau ([log in to unmask])
Melissa Parker ([log in to unmask])
Annelieke Driessen
Research Fellow (Medical Anthropology)
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
15-17 Tavistock Place, room 110, London, WC1H 9SH
Tel: 020 7958 8295 ext. 8295
For more information about the Forms of Care project:
http://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/formsofcare/
New stories in the Thinking With Dementia Series:
http://somatosphere.net/thinking-with-dementia