Vincent Duclos, PhD, assistant professor of global studies and of science, technology and society, pushes his students to experiment with the digital spaces they inhabit.
Hometown: Gatineau, Québec
Degree: PhD in Anthropology, University of Montreal
Research interests: Social dimensions of digital spaces technologies, global health, development, and relations between India and Africa
What did you do before coming to Drexel?
I was a postdoc, and specifically a Steinberg Global Health Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University in Montreal.
What is your favorite book? Movie?
Book: “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Movie: “Dogville,” by Lars von Trier
What is your favorite food or restaurant?
Indian food
When is the last time you did something “for the first time”? What was it?
I recently tried hunting for the first time with friends.
What/who inspires you?
Walking
What was the most impactful moment of your own college career?
Discovering that I could write, at least a bit, while taking a French literature class
Which current event/issue do you think students should know more about and why?
They should perhaps be more aware that media devices are not merely tools they use, but environments in/through which they live. And they should train themselves to craft and experiment with these environments. Not because they are currently bad or toxic per se, but rather because learning to collectively inhabit media in a creative way (versus a reactive or reactionary way) is an important political issue.
What would students be surprised to learn about you?
I am one of the biggest hockey fans on campus — but certainly not a Flyers fan!
If you could relive a moment in your life what would it be?
The half hour after my first child, Émile, was born
What did you want to be when you were a kid? What made you want to become a professor?
I wanted to become a doctor. I’m not sure how exactly I became a professor, but it does combine a few things I have grown fond of, such as the adrenaline rush of teaching, the restlessness of doing research, and the almost meditative state that sometimes (not often!) comes with writing.
What do you hope to add to the CoAS community?
Hopefully a mix of energy and original research/thinking
My primary areas of research include digital spaces/technologies, global health, development, and relations between India and Africa.
My current book project, "Bandwidth for Life: Anthropological Incursions into the Pan-African e-Network", explores a transnational network through which tertiary hospitals in India provide medical teleconsultations to health centers across Africa. This is a colossal network, aimed at caring for patients at a distance. Drawing upon extensive field research carried in India and West Africa, the book examines how digital technology transforms the space of clinical work and reconfigures the distribution of medical care. It suggests that the network points towards new practical horizons of intelligibility within which human lives come to matter to people, to take shape as objects of medical knowledge and intervention. The book also investigates how the Pan-African e-Network contributes to the emergence of new transnational markets between India and Africa.
Over the past two years, I have also explored the impact of mobile connectivity on global health. In collaboration with colleagues from the Centre de recherche en santé de Nouna (CRSN), I have studied the effects of mobile devices on medical monitoring and care in rural Burkina Faso. To do so, I have examined the implementation process – challenges, limitations, and unintended consequences – of a mobile health (mHealth) network, MOS@N. My research aims to: a) explore the impact of data connectivity on the daily operations of primary healthcare centers and the lives of patients and laypersons; b) gain a better understanding of how mHealth forges new relations between technology, social life, and healthcare; c) provide ethnographic insight into issues of scaling and replicability which are ubiquitous in the global health world.
Finally, I am currently developing a research project devoted to the problematic use of media devices in urban India. Specifically, I aim to explore the enigmatic, contested yet severe mental health condition of Internet addiction (IA). On the one hand, I want to examine what the debates surrounding IA as a diagnostic category reveal about socially accepted, digital forms of life. On the other hand, I will work with specialized treatment centers to understand the experience, and therapeutic management of IA in India.
