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Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.

Abstract: " In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty...Read more

AO. situated data.

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

NANO: (How) is “Africa” invoked when the author discusses data (as a place with unique demands or responsibilities, for example)?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa

Community Data Case Study Approach

"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

How does this formation or practice reflect on STS as critical pedagogy?
ESTS STS Pedagogy, Engagement, Research Thematic Collection Elaborative Review 2021Querying STS Pedagogies

AO. demography data.

Biruk highlights that "a main point of controversy between anthroplogists and demographers is how they might answer the question: "what is the relationship between data and social reality it...Read more

TECHNO: (How) does the analyst account for the data practices and responsibilities of the people and organizations studied?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa

AO. non-innocence of the critiquing anthropologist

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

DATA: (How) does the analyst account for their own data practices and responsibilities?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa

AO. self data practices.

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

DATA: (How) does the analyst account for their own data practices and responsibilities?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa

AO. call for anthropologists to reflect on their own data

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

DATA: (How) does the analyst account for their own data practices and responsibilities?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa

AO. quantitative data.

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

MICRO: What did the analyst choose to describe as “science” and/or “data” in Africa?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa

AO. Extractive logics

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

TECHNO: (How) does the analyst account for the data practices and responsibilities of the people and organizations studied?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa
Sambuli, Nanjira. 2018. Typed Interview Responses. STS Across Borders.

AO: With her permission, I include Nanjira Sambuli's full typed responses to the interview questions I sent her.Read more

AO. discourses critiquing numbers and quantification

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

META: What discourses does the analyst consider/leverage to characterize/theorize science and technology in Africa?
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Querying Science and Technology Studies in Africa
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