AO: In this 2017 paper by Marlee Tichenor, she uses the concept of data performativity to examine the ways that the data production incorporated into the local fight against malaria in Senegal is conditioned by preconceived ideas of the public health problem of malaria and how these ways to understand malaria are reified. She argues that data collection and synthesis maintains the model that funding agencies construct and reifies both the definitions of health problems and the power relations embedded within global health flows of capital, technology, and knowledge.
Marlee Tichenor, "Tichenor, Marlee. 2017. “Data Performativity, Performing Health Work: Malaria and Labor in Senegal.” Medical Anthropology 36 (5): 436–48. ", contributed by Angela Okune, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 1 August 2018, accessed 24 August 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/tichenor-marlee-2017-“data-performativity-performing-health-work-malaria-and-labor-senegal”
Critical Commentary
AO: In this 2017 paper by Marlee Tichenor, she uses the concept of data performativity to examine the ways that the data production incorporated into the local fight against malaria in Senegal is conditioned by preconceived ideas of the public health problem of malaria and how these ways to understand malaria are reified. She argues that data collection and synthesis maintains the model that funding agencies construct and reifies both the definitions of health problems and the power relations embedded within global health flows of capital, technology, and knowledge.