BookEugene T. Richardson ; foreword by Paul Farmer.
Summary: A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.
Contents:
Gramsci, but more pragmatic / Paul Farmer
Part I. Carnivalization
Introduction : Pr [Global health equity | Coloniality]
Colonizer, interrupted (flash fiction)
The allegory of the warren (platonic dialogues)
The pacification of the primitive tribes of Lake Geneva (Nacirema ethnography)
WHO's semiosis (semiotics)
The ebola suspect's dilemma (call and response)
Not-so-big data and immodest causal inference (symbolic reparations)
Ebola vaccines and the ideal speech situation (border gnosis)
The race-PrEP study (counterhegemonic modeling)
The epistemic reformation
Pandemicity, COVID-19, and the limits of public health "science".