Unknown knowns---or "public secrets"---may play an integral part in publicly funded medical science. In one large transnational field research site in Africa, such unknowing pertains to vital material inequalities across the relations of scientific production. These inequalities are open to experience but remain often unacknowledged in public speech and scientific texts. This silence is not usually achieved by suppressing knowledge but through linguistic convention and differentiation between places and moments of knowing and ignorance. Switching between known and unknown according to situation and interlocutor is an important, largely implicit skill that maintains relations necessary to conduct clinical research---linking bodies, lives, institutions, and technologies across differentials of resources, expertise, and power. Unknowing, then, facilitates research; and it shapes the resulting work and perpetuates the political and economic contradictions that pervade the context and the research endeavor itself. Unknowing thus poses a challenge for conventional anthropological modes of critique and engagement.
...More
Article
Bragesjö, Fredrik;
Hallberg, Margareta;
(2011)
Dilemmas of a Vitalizing Vaccine Market: Lessons from the MMR Vaccine/Autism Debate
(/isis/citation/CBB001034622/)
Book
Robin Wolfe Scheffler;
(2019)
A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB660913926/)
Article
Duncan, Peter;
(2013)
Failing to Professionalise, Struggling to Specialise: The Rise and Fall of Health Promotion as a Putative Specialism in England, 1980--2000
(/isis/citation/CBB001320596/)
Book
Jonathan M. Berman;
(2020)
Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB269088658/)
Book
Erika Dyck;
Maureen Lux;
(2020)
Challenging Choices: Canada's Population Control in the 1970s
(/isis/citation/CBB928803182/)
Book
Fisher, Jill;
(2009)
Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials
(/isis/citation/CBB000953570/)
Book
Barr, Donald A.;
(2008)
Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Health
(/isis/citation/CBB000831474/)
Book
Livingston, Julie;
(2012)
Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
(/isis/citation/CBB001420179/)
Book
Marcos Cueto;
Theodore M. Brown;
Elizabeth Fee;
(2019)
The World Health Organization: A History
(/isis/citation/CBB989887302/)
Article
Jennifer Dusdal;
Justin J. W. Powell;
David P. Baker;
Yuan Chih Fu;
Yahya Shamekhi;
Manfred Stock;
(2020)
University vs. Research Institute? The Dual Pillars of German Science Production, 1950–2010
(/isis/citation/CBB533528425/)
Article
Berlivet, Luc;
(2008)
Between Expertise and Biomedicine: Public Health Research in France after the Second World War
(/isis/citation/CBB000931177/)
Book
Hoyt, Kendall;
(2012)
Long Shot: Vaccines for National Defense
(/isis/citation/CBB001210034/)
Chapter
Cummings, Dolan;
(2005)
Think Tanks and Intellectual Authority Outside the University: Information Technocracy or Republic of Letters?
(/isis/citation/CBB001000220/)
Book
Lukas Engelmann;
(2018)
Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic
(/isis/citation/CBB145222575/)
Article
Todd M Olszewski;
(2018)
Between Bench and Bedside: Building Clinical Consensus at the NIH, 1977–2013
(/isis/citation/CBB649225500/)
Article
Ren, Jie;
Peters, Hans Peter;
Allgaier, Joachim;
Lo, Yin-Yueh;
(2014)
Similar Challenges but Different Responses: Media Coverage of Measles Vaccination in the UK and China
(/isis/citation/CBB001420070/)
Article
Rubin, Lawrence C.;
(2014)
Introduction: Mental Health and Illness in American Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001202129/)
Book
O'Doherty, Kieran;
Einsiedel, Edna F;
(2013)
Public Engagement and Emerging Technologies
(/isis/citation/CBB001420078/)
Article
Santora, Lidia;
Skolbekken, John-Arne;
(2011)
From Brittle Bones to Standard Deviations: The Historical Development of Osteoporosis in the Late-Twentieth-Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001250223/)
Book
Stern, Alexandra;
(2012)
Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America
(/isis/citation/CBB001213529/)
Be the first to comment!