PUBLIC LECTURE: Entwined lives and enclaved medicine

Global Health – whether invoked to describe border-crossing disease threats, or planet-wide policies and practices designed to improve health – is routinely imagined in terms of the entwining of lives and deaths everywhere. Appeals to this global health interdependency are mobilized by those doing so in the name of national security and individual self-interest, as much as by others advocating for humanitarian relief and health as a human right. And yet all the attention and investment that have been put into global health over the last decade have led to remarkably uneven and geographically patchy impacts on the ground.

This presentation explores these impacts, paying particular attention to a re-emerging pattern of biomedical enclaving. Like the re-emerging tropical diseases that are a common concern of today’s global health initiatives, the enclaving of global health recalls the territorialization of medicine in militarized colonial contexts. But in contrast to imperial efforts to partition and spatially manage the health of administrators and soldiers vis-a-vis local workers and natives, today’s enclaved outcomes needs to be explained instead in terms of a very different and largely non-militarized targeting process. Targets for global health improvements, including PEPFAR targets, Global Fund targets, World Health Organization targets and the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, have led to geographically targeted interventions on the ground, and these, amongst other results, have generated a pattern of enclaving. By charting some of these enclaved outcomes – including both aid enclaves in poor countries and research enclaves in rich countries – we can start in turn to come to terms with how the invisible hand of the market has replaced the visible hand of the military in today’s territorialization of life and death.

Cost: Free. No RSVP required.