Borderland Biologies: Malaria Control and Drug Resistance at the Edges
Speaker: Jenna Grant, University of Washington
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
Via Zoom. Register here.
About the talk: Malaria with delayed response to treatment with artemisinin-based drugs was reported in western Cambodia around 2006 and was soon found in other border zones in Myanmar, Thailand, Viet Nam, Lao PDR, and Yunnan Province in China. Twenty years later, elimination of P. falciparum malaria is on the horizon in the Greater Mekong subregion. What techniques of knowing and acting upon malaria parasites brought this horizon into view? Drawing from archival research on malaria control policies and ethnographic research with malaria scientists in Cambodia, I trace how comparison to, erasure of, and even haunting by previous episodes of drug resistance configure contemporary practices. Two figures of thought— “the human reservoir” and “Cambodia as experiment”—link histories of global drug failure to anticipated future scenarios. These figures of thought emerge in the biographies of scientists, the embrace and contestation of prior elimination paradigms, environmental histories of borderlands, and the routes of migrant laborers.
About our speaker: Jenna Grant is Associate Professor of Anthropology and faculty at the Center for Southeast Asia & its Diasporas (C-SEAD) at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research centers Cambodia as a site for theorization of postcolonial and Cold War histories in contemporary medical, technological, and visual practices. She is the author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh (UW Press, 2022).