Metrics of the Global Sovereign: Numbers and stories in global health

Join us for a Global Health Exchange lecture, sponsored by DGHI. This event is free and open to the public so please spread the word to your colleagues and students. Light lunch will be served. ABOUT THE LECTURE: The recent shift from International Health Development to Global Health Sciences in the history of post-colonial health aid is not a simple substitution of new bottles for old wine. Complex transformations in the practices of audit, funding, and intervention are seen in this effort to improve health outcomes on a global scale. The growing reliance on specific kinds of quantitative metrics that make use of evidence-based measures, experimental research platforms, and cost-effectiveness rubrics for even the most intractable problems is one transformation. Collectively these trends pose a problem of knowledge in relation to how we understand efficacy but also how we come to terms with the new ¿global sovereign¿ ¿ a flexible assemblage of data production, number crunching and profit-sourcing that asks all exercises of intervention to work within its terms and limits. Ethnography pushes us to see the remainder, or residuals, of these trends, appearing as stories of single lives saved, struggles won and relationships emergent. Stories might be read as both antidote and engine in the markets of global health today.