Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the network of relations connected to the glass barrier that divides the waiting room from the Triage area of the E.R. Patients, providers and "the Glass", these are the protagonists of the grassroots reshaping of the most important resource of the Emergency Room: The Time.

Paper long abstract:

The daily clash between patients and providers sees at its center the Glass barrier between them. Both these "space based" identities exploit the material features of this "container" through strategic and tactical behaviors. The glass became the battleground where the two groups are projecting expectations into an endless informal negotiation for attentions and cares. Here begins a broader re-appropriation of the central hospital structure by the local identities, which are unhinging the standardized organization of time to build a space for their social needs. The glass embodies the spoliation of the personal history imposed from a top-down perspective by the central structure. However, this panoptic device is also capable to offer tactical possibilities exploited by the patients through a grassroots mobilization. The paper sustains the blind ambivalence of the barrier as both the exemplification of the central authority's power and as the main instrument of marginal power practices. The glass became the key to conquer the only resource that matters inside the E.R.: "the control upon our time". However, the dialogue between the central authority and its margins is not that easy. As a provider said: "The glass is the only thing that saves us, we can ignore people and not going crazy, someone said that we need to remove it because it is too much impersonal. I said to him that all the nurses would be on strike until the glass could stay. I would personally enchain myself to the front door before letting this happen!"

Paper short abstract:

Which elements of analysis may the study of a device add to the reflections on the idea of container when such a device is conceptualized as a flat surface that suddenly traps? This is one of the most significant questions that we aim at deepening in the paper.

Paper long abstract:

Reflections on the concept of container - which we intend to focus in this paper -are based on the study of a device that, instead of encapsulating, suddenly traps.

Designed to restrain or stop the movement of bacteria in investigations carried out by scientists in the frontier of knowledge, one of the questions we will ask ourselves is which elements of analysis may the study of such a device add to reflections on the idea of container when said device is conceptualized as a flat surface?

Which are the techniques that allow to build such a device?

In the paper we will go deep into the transformation of the flat surface into a container and reflect on the idea of creativity (Boden 2004), which the design of the device under consideration assumes. We will examine the concept of container taking into account its interaction with the living matter in question and, especially, study one of the skills that scientists develop related to the idea of design as the imagination of the future (Ingold 2012).

How the inner and outer sides of a device - designed on a flat surface - are conceptualized? Which is the relevance of the conceptualization of interiority and exteriority of said device with regard to that it actually allows in the research carried out by scientists? Also, how the device interiority and exteriority are distinguished on the basis of image observations? These are some of the most important questions to deepen in this paper.

Paper short abstract:

N95 respirator masks do more than physically “contain” TB. This paper uses containment as a lens to understand N95 masks as social objects which enable stigma.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the role of the N95 respirator mask circulated from state-funded Tuberculosis (TB) treatment programmes to patients who are undergoing treatment for different forms of TB. Although mask-wearing protocol aims to physically "contain" TB, and thus stem the airborne spread of disease, this paper looks at the other properties N95 masks contain as social objects. The very materiality of masks provides insight into patient behaviour towards mask-wearing and stigma. Drawing upon ethnographic research undertaken in Khayelitsha-the largest township in Cape Town, South Africa- masks become mobile agents of sociality, but simultaneously a visible, biomedical disclosure of TB infection for the mask wearer. Using the theoretical construct of containment, the paper argues that masks contain far more than just TB bacilli, saliva or warm breath. Data evidenced different types of containment associated to masks and mask-wearing produced two unintended, yet significant consequences for TB patients outside of clinical spaces. First, the exteriority of a mask enabled forms of stigma and second, the stigma associated with wearing a mask perpetuated a process of "losing face" for mask wearers (Yang et al 2008). N95 respirator masks are a thoroughly social and globalised object and their use, circulation, and disuse, lend valuable insight to global health efforts to prevent and contain TB.

Paper short abstract:

This paper develops the notion of 'room space' to rethink modes of scientific inquiry and attention.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines three locations where scientists engage in the experimental manipulation of mosquitoes: the insectary, the semi-field station, and the outdoors. Scientific and regulatory discourses (and, often, science studies scholarship) place these locations in a linear trajectory of ever-diminishing containment and ever-greater approximation to the real world. Instead, we propose to treat each of these sites as creating a distinct mode of interiority, a particular room-space (Clark 2013). It is through the fabrication of a sense of proximity that researchers substantiate their observations and can take in - and be taken in by - the world of mosquitoes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the rise of the mobile laboratory in global health and examines the ways in which that mobility is premised on the capacity to compress laboratory infrastructures into small-scale containers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the rise of the mobile laboratory in global health and examines the ways in which that mobility is premised on the capacity to compress laboratory infrastructures into small-scale containers. In 2008 funding for the rollout of 4,800,000 malaria rapid diagnostic tests across Papua New Guinea was awarded by the Global Fund to accompany a new Arthemisinin Combined Therapy (ACT) treatment protocol for malaria. By 2011 the RDTs had not arrived in the country. By 2013 their presence at rural health centres remained patchy. Rapid Diagnostic Tests encapsulated in a small plastic cassette the size of a fist are designed to travel to places where the distributed infrastructure of laboratories, microscopes and expertise does not reach. Yet in PNG those tests often failed to move. If laboratories have historically been configured as spaces of containment and control, the mobile laboratory turns our attention to the ways in which they are also contained, or encompassed, by the worlds they seek to test. When health systems rely on the movement of small things across expansive, rugged landscapes, new kinds of relationships between the internalities and externalities of diagnosis come into view.

Paper short abstract:

I describe how Nicaraguan hygienists work with health certificate applicants to improvise methods for collecting and anlyzing human waste.

Paper long abstract:

The department of hygiene in Nicaragua's Ministry of Health is responsible for processing all health certificate applications. Anyone who is formally employed in Nicaragua's food, service, or hospitality sector must possess such a certificate. Part of the certification process is a fecal exam. In this paper, I draw on fieldwork conducted with Nicaraguan state hygienists and discuss the communicative and material labor that goes into harvesting and processing human waste. Given the scarcity of laboratory resources in Nicaragua's health sector, the collection and processing of waste requires that certificate applicants provide their own containers. These re-purposed containers become temporary parts of Nicaragua's public health infrastructure. In order to help applicants turn glass jars and plastic tiffins into suitable fecal transport devices, hygienists draw on a wide repertoire of jokes, intimate knowledge of household economies, and basic microbial biology. Drawing on the work of Julie Livingston, I argue that the 'improvisation' of fecal containment in Nicaragua shows how public health workers, well aware of strict global standards for hygienic measurement, approach shit not with repulsion but with pragmatic skill. For the anthropology of global health, attending to improvised tactics for containing and analysing shit affords a novel understanding of health bureaucracies, which are often depicted as sites for the strict arbitration of purity and pollution. I argue that in Nicaragua, health bureaucracy is instead a 'crafted' result of embedded social and material relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the 'gender work' done by international global health programmes that target men in Africa through so-called male involvement initiatives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the "gender work" done by international global health programmes that target men in Africa through so-called male involvement initiatives. These intitiatives, which aim to improve african men as fathers and as companionate, monogamous marriage partners who are willing to subject themselves to HIV prevention and gender based violence programmes, have grown increasingly common over the last decade in the field of global health. Building on case study material from Kenya and South Africa, we argue that these intitiatives simultaneously challenge and reinforce stereotypes about african masculinity, most often through an under-examined deployment of the the container term, gender equality. Here we see a double containment: of masculinity and This paper examines the work done by international global health programmes that target men in Africa through so-called male involvement initiatives. Using case study material from Kenya and South Africa, we argue that these intitiatives simultaneously challenge and reinforce stereotypes about african masculinity, most often through an under-examined deployment of the container term 'gender equality.' Here we see a double containment: of masculinity and gender equality. Attempting to unpack these containers using a feminist approach, this paper explores what else is at stake in attempts to re-shape presumptive African masculinity through a global health apparatus.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyse the politics of ‘opening up’ and ‘sealing in’; seemingly opposite techniques of caring for and maintaining the health of honeybees.

Paper long abstract:

The rational beehive is a container that has been designed to be opened up, dismantled and inspected for, amongst other things, disease. Designed by the Reverend L.L. Langstroth in 1852, it is a unit for bee hygiene. The rational hive separates the site of the bees' reproductive cycle from their productive labour, and via removable frames it makes it possible for beekeepers, and government Bee Inspectors, to examine the bees and the cells of wax comb containing eggs and brood for signs of disease. Not all beekeepers agree that the opening out of a beehive for inspection is good for bee health. Some 'natural' beekeepers instead argue that opening up a beehive is comparable to opening up the body of an organism, and that to do so damages the honeybee colony and increases the risk of introducing disease. Some of these beekeepers use a Warré beehive (Abbé Warré 1948) and permit honeybees to seal up and create a closed unit with a antimicrobial resin called propolis. This paper will therefore analyse the politics of 'opening up' and 'sealing in'; seemingly opposite techniques of caring for and maintaining the health of honeybees.