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Anthropology in Global Health Trials

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Tuesday, October 18, 2016
4:15 pm - 5:45 pm
Anita Hardon

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard to evaluate and generalize the efficacy of global health interventions across diverse socio-cultural contexts. Social scientists have criticized these trials for ignoring the social and infrastructural conditions that impinge on how technologies work, and for their optimistic belief in generalizability. What if contexts interact with technologies and with people administering and using them thus upending easy hopes that we can simply scale up and generalize results validated under specific socio-cultural conditions? Over the past two decades, anthropologists at the University of Amsterdam have participated in several global heath experiments, seeking to transform the way they are done, in an attempt to replace the testing-machine model with a more open-ended, flexible and iterative approach that incorporates biosocial understandings that emerge during the experiments, and contributes to more context-sensitive global heath technologies.

Anita Hardon, Professor of Anthropology of Health and Social Care at the University of Amsterdam, specializes in multi-sited studies of global health technologies.She is Director of the research priority area Social Science and Global Health, and co-Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Amsterdam.

Contact: Thomas Johnson