This editorial is titled "Coffee Time at the Conference : The Global Health Complex in Action to Tackle Antimicrobial Resistance", and according to the editors, explores issues raised in the first editorial through:
..a constructed dialogue between an epidemiologist, an STS scholar and a critical activist. Such tongue-in-cheek dialogues and coffee house conversations offer a rough narrative and a fruitful form to tease out some of the different positions involved in encounter of STS and Global Health."
What follows is a delightful dialogue between the three during coffee-time at a (hypothetical) conference on antimicrobial resistance, just before a plenary. An excerpt:
Dr. STS: Clearly technologies also embody assumptions about the users, norms, values, and logics of the places that they are designed in and for. We saw this with the latest Ebola outbreak. Tracking mobile cell phones was supposed to be the answer to all the problems and they were supposed to be used as a means of keeping track of people and the epidemic as it unfolded. Yet we now know that many people in the Global South have a different relationship to their phones to those in the Global North, where one person owns one phone and that phone is closely tied to their personal identity. In West Africa, it is common to have more than one phone with multiple sim cards. So depending on who is involved and consulted, design and implementation choices differ.
Dr Epi: OK, point taken, community engagement is needed in order to cope with AMR. I would suggest that we reach out to patients and members of the public and ask them.
Dr. Activist: Community engagement does not exist to mop up your poorly thought-through projects. Besides, are there any community members at this conference?
Dr. Epi: Ahem… the organisers should probably have invited patient representatives and clinicians."
Clearly, both epistemological and ethical positions can be teased out, but there's also an attempt to understand and engage with different positions, possibly culminating in a future collaboration.
Anonymous, "STS & GLOBAL HEALTH: SPECIAL ISSUE PART II", contributed by Prerna Srigyan, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 30 July 2018, accessed 28 July 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sts-global-health-special-issue-part-ii
Critical Commentary
This text contains excerpts from the editorial of the first part of a Special Issue on 'STS & Global Health' published in Science & Technology Studies (2017, Vol. 30, No. 4). The issue contains four research papers, one commentary paper, and two book reviews.