Cite as:
Okune, Angela. 2018. "Adia Benton." In STS in "Africa" Personal Careers. In STS in "Africa" in Formation, created by Angela Okune and Aadita Chaudhury. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August.
Adia Benton is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her interests include global health, biomedicine, development and humanitarianism and professional sports. Broadly, she is interested in patterns of inequality in the distribution of and the politics of care in settings “socialized” for scarcity. This means understanding the political, economic and historical factors shaping how care is provided in complex humanitarian emergencies and in longer-term development projects – like those for health. These concerns arise from her previous career in the fields of public health and post-conflict development in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota, 2015), explores the treatment of AIDS as an exceptional disease and the recognition and care that this takes away from other diseases and public health challenges in poor countries.
Her second book project, tentatively titled Cutting Cures, focuses on the global movement to improve access to quality surgical care in poor countries, using it as a case study for describing and understanding ideological formations in global public health.
This PECE essay helps to answer the STS Across Borders analytic question: “What people, projects, and products exemplify how this STS formation has developed over time?”
This essay highlights prominant and upcoming individuals working on critical science and technology issues in Africa and is part of a broader exhibit on "STS in Africa."
STS Across Borders is a special exhibit organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to showcase how the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has developed in different times, places...Read more
AO: This 2016 paper by Adia Benton focuses on how structures of inequality shape the everyday practices of humanitarianism with a focus on African expatriates working in African countries in which they are not "native". She argues that African expatriates operate under conditions in which...Read more
AO: This 2017 paper by Adia Benton she looks at the social production of “relevant” anthropological knowledge and its relationship to four forms of distance implicated in how anthropologists communicate relevance to each other and to others: physical, disciplinary, interpretive, and...Read more