Katherine Mason

Infectious Change

Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Katherine A. Mason is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Mai 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 152mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 454g
• ISBN-13: 9780804794435
• ISBN-10: 080479443X
• Artikelnr.: 44382747

Autorenporträt

Katherine A. Mason is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Introduction
chapter abstract
This chapter situates the reader in time and space and lays out the main
arguments of the book. The author provides an overview of the recent
history of public health in China, and describes the pseudonymous city of
Tianmai. The author then suggests that due to key differences between
professional responsibility as it is defined in the clinical and public
health settings - particularly with regards to the aggregate nature of the
public health "client" - a bifurcation of service and governance arose in
Tianmai between a "common" being served and local populations being
governed. The chapter lays out five "commons" that will be examined in the
rest of the book: a civilized immigrant common, a professional common, a
transnational scientific common, a global health common, and a global
common. It also suggests that the Tianmai case can offer novel insights
into the study of global health.
2City of Immigrants
chapter abstract
This chapter takes a closer look at the immigrant city of Tianmai, and
considers how the modern, cosmopolitan urban paradise that Tianmai's elites
were trying to build included some and excluded others. In particular, the
chapter examines the relationship - or lack thereof - between Tianmai's
public health professionals and the city's enormous "floating population"
of rural-to-urban migrants. The author shows how her interlocutors - former
migrants themselves - refused to engage with migrant individuals, and
actively maintained personal, moral, and professional boundaries between
themselves and the floating population. This effectively divulged public
health professionals of responsibility for the majority of the people who
lived in their city and established them as "biological non-citizens" who
had to be governed but could not be served. In doing this public health
professionals worked to serve a civilized immigrant common of modern urban
subjects that did not include the floating population.
3Relationships, Trust, and Truths
chapter abstract
This chapter illustrates how the power to implement any given public health
initiative in China was located within the webs of guanxi, or personal
relationships, that public health professionals spun anew at the beginning
of each project. Drawing on rich ethnographic description, the chapter
takes the reader into the banqueting and other entertainment rituals that
public health professionals engaged in almost daily in order to create and
maintain these networks of reciprocal obligation and personalistic trust.
The author then examines how a group of young, highly educated post-SARS
reformers attempted to rid the public health system of guanxi, which they
regarded as anti-scientific and akin to corruption. These reformers hoped
to build a more transparent and reliable system of disease reporting and
governance by establishing a professional common grounded in
professionalized trust.
4Scientific Imaginaries
chapter abstract
This chapter critically examines public health research and science in
Tianmai. The author explores the efforts of Chinese public health
professionals to advance their careers through scientific research, and
discusses how in the wake of SARS, Chinese public health institutions
dramatically increased their investments in scientific research - rendering
publishable research a major focus of local public health work. Newly hired
young people labored to produce the "quality" and "true" data that they
associated with good science. They hoped that doing so would give them a
chance to "develop themselves" as members of transnational scientific
common, and to escape a local moral world that they felt was dominated by
mimicry, deception, and instability. The chapter suggests that their
approach to research provides a mirror through which public health
researchers in other contexts could critically examine their own ethical
practices, raising new questions about global research ethics.
5Pandemic Betrayals
chapter abstract
This chapter provides an ethnographically rich eyewitness account of
Tianmai's response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, describing how
public health professionals in Tianmai drew upon the lessons of SARS to
mount what they thought would be an internationally lauded response to
H1N1. In attempting to prove their pandemic preparedness capabilities and
ensure a place among the global scientific elite, however, Tianmai's public
health professionals instead found that their full admittance into a global
health common and a global common remained elusive. The chapter discusses
the professionals' difficulties in escaping their perceived status as a
source, rather than a victim, of dangerous viruses; their use of disease
control tactics that were portrayed abroad as excessive and
unsophisticated; and their disappointment with the failure of their leaders
and guanxi partners to act in the professional fashion that they had been
trying to promote since SARS.
6Conclusion
chapter abstract
The concluding chapter returns to the broader question of what professional
responsibility can or should mean in public health and beyond, and asks how
public health professionals in China could work to reconcile the "common"
with the "population," and population needs with individual needs. The
author uses the case of HIV/AIDS to examine the ways in which some public
health professionals in Tianmai were experimenting with alternative
interpretations of public health that broadened the boundaries of the
common to allow in otherwise maligned groups, including rural migrants, gay
men, and sex workers. The book ends by considering the implications of this
ethnography for the study of public health - both local and global - more
broadly.