Biruk writes that she hopes the book will reflect the potential of anthropology's commitment to "slow research" but also prompt anthropologists to "reflect on how our own data activities...Read more
Biruk's first footnote states: "All project and personal names in this book are anonymized. ... Researchers were, for the most part, amenable to being mentioned by name and having their projects...Read more
Biruk highlights that the demographic surveys she studies "raise the specter of the exploitation, extractive logics, racism, and ethnocentrism that have underlain science in Africa," (22)....Read more
"We use here play in the sense of Winnicott (2005) and others when thinking of play as a form of therapy. What we mean by this is that playing with numbers is a productive approach for thinking...Read more
Biruk challenges the abstract universality of data, seen as unanchored from its site and relations of produciton, by demonstrating through her ethnography how Malawi and Malawians shaped it...Read more
Biruk builds on scholarly discourse (called critical data studies?; sociology of quantification?) about how numbers, categories and statistics are produced by their social contexts and actors. Read more
"To imagine Community Data further meant imagining another kind of classroom as a data infrastructure, something that opened up the idea of the classroom - and campus - itself as Community...Read more
Biruk hones in on quantitative demographic health data in Malawi as the "science" she chooses to study. Throughout the book she draws on her experience as an anthropologist and compares the...Read more
In Biruk's appendix, she includes a questionnare titled "sample household roster questions" (pages 217 - 219). These are the questions that the quantitative researchers she was studying were using...Read more
Biruk notes her own complicity in the systems she is critiquing highlighlighting how "anthropologists make global health in the process of studying in, and continue to be as "doubly ambivalent,...Read more
AO: With her permission, I include Nanjira Sambuli's full typed responses to the interview questions I sent her.Read more