Global Health Seminar: "Bandwidth for Life: A Study of the Pan-African e-Network Project"
The 91社区 Global Health Programs are happy to partner with the Social Studies of Medicine Department to present a seminar presentation by 2015 Steinberg Global Health Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Vincent Duclos.
Abstract:
Global health is being transformed by a proliferation of screens, interfaces and networks that link bodies, knowledge, and care practices in new spatial and temporal configurations. A wide array of eHealth interventions that rely on information and communication technologies聽(ICTs) to provide medical solutions on a global scale have emerged in recent years. This talk addresses the theoretical and practical challenges presented by such developments. I draw on an ethnography of the Pan-African e-Network, a network connecting health centres located across the African continent with tertiary care hospitals in India. An integrated solution aimed at caring for patients at a distance, the Pan-African e-Network enacts a digital opening of the clinic and reconfigures the spatiality of healthcare delivery. However, this opening up is not a matter of straightforward emancipation. Contrary to widespread conceptions of networks as enabling fluid, seamless circulation of data and expertise, my analysis of the Pan-African e-Network exposes its embeddedness, plasticity and the sheer materiality of concrete practices. This research aims to examine how digital media forge new relations between space, technology, and clinical practice. Ultimately, it points towards new horizons of intelligibility within which human lives come to take shape as objects of knowledge and intervention.
About our speaker:
Vincent Duclos is a Steinberg Global Health Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at 91社区. He has held academic positions at Laboratoire d鈥檃nthropologie sociale (Coll猫ge de France) and the Coll猫ge d鈥櫭﹖udes mondiales (FMSH) in Paris. He has completed his PhD in anthropology at Universit茅 de Montr茅al in 2013, and has been a visiting doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany). His research expertise includes global health, digital media, the reconfiguration of health-related practices, development theories, social studies of science and technology as well as relations between India and the African continent. He has conducted research in India, in West Africa (Senegal and Burkina Faso) and in Canada. Dr. Duclos has published articles in various scientific journals.
