Biruk notes extensive research fatique by Malawi participants and states: "residents across sub-Saharan Africa have now become accustomed to projects in their midst," (23). In her conclusion...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
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
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
"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
AO: With her permission, I include Nanjira Sambuli's full typed responses to the interview questions I sent her.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
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
Here you find a translation of an interview that I conducted in German with an employee of the municipal GmbH Economic Development in order to find out more about data processing and sharing practices as well as about the use cases for pedestrian counters. It is slightly shortened for reasons of...Read more