LICENTIA COGITATIONIS

I. Surveillance: Coloniality and Complicity   The History of the African AIDS Epidemic Routine monitoring and sample collection by Western-based corporations identified novel viral signatures in blood but concealed these findings from workers and public health authorities. The lack of surveillance technology to identify it didn’t mean HIV wasn’t spreading,; it meant systems of power failed to look further, fund research, or listen to affected communities. Their silence was an act of violence and serves as evidence of the power that health surveillance technologies have in forecasting and deciding the future.  Evidence from Kinshasa, once a Belgian colonial outpost, reveals HIV in archived blood specimens dating back to the 1950s and 60s. The virus moved slowly along colonial trade routes here,  incubating in silence, before reaching urban centers where it eventually drew institutional attention. Yet even then, the signs were ignored. For nearly  two decades,  as...

Public Health is the most recent site of structural violence and control. What can we do? We have a responsibility as intellectuals to speak truth and expose lies in media, government, elite institutions, and in our own communities. Noam Chomsky warned us in the 60s of the need to hold systems of power to account and avoid the tendency to align our professional priorities with state power. The political economy of misinformation and managed chaos in the Trump Administration is the new frontier; and we must learn to navigate this terrain if we are to outlast the fusillades of fascist ideology that is upon us. Public Health is the best example for how state power and private interests work together to systematically deconstruct the very principles underlying the structures of care on which our public health and human services delivery system is built. Root and stem, they move with precision to exploit vulnerabilities, create controversies, and disrupt the financial and regulatory systems...

Is HIV Vaccine Research a site of progress, or power?  I sat down with Jarissa Greenard of Vanderbilt University’s HIV Vaccine Program to discuss the implications of cultural humility and communication in the research and development contexts. We discussed how the values of  diversity, equity, and inclusion are   entangled with the success of clinical trial outcomes; and how anthropological theory can be a framework for building equitable research designs.  Check  out the conversation here:  https://lnkd.in/egz4uFfU What what unsaid, was the mountain of thoughts and feelings I have about research on human subjects, the role of power and Capital, the critical question of "access" to knowledge created from the study, and the systems of meaning (science and society) that reduce people to data points, without regard for the subjective experiences of participants.   The link above is my public opinion, but read on for the rest of what I think.   ....