Description:

Abstract: In 2008, I sat with a group of Malawian data collectors in a mini bus in rural Malawi where they were administering household-level surveys for an American-led longitudinal project. They joked that a colleague sitting under a tree, pencil in hand and head bent over a survey’s pages, was “cooking data.” Cooked data, or data that are fudged, falsified or inaccurate, haunts global health science and points to tensions between standardization and improvisation that preoccupy demographers who seek to measure and quantify population based phenomenon in Africa. In this talk and my larger book project, I borrow this phrase from fieldworkers to consider two main questions: How does “raw” information—responses recorded on to the pages of a survey—acquire value as evidence that will inform national policy? How do on-the-ground dynamics and practices of AIDS research cultures influence and mediate the production of good, clean numbers? Drawing on ethnographic work with survey projects, this talk shifts attention from the researchers, experts and clinicians we often associate with global health to a set of actors at global health’s lowest echelons: fieldworkers. I show how the value of survey data is constituted by the labor performed by hundreds of fieldworkers, foregrounding how they learn to (imperfectly) embody demographers’ epistemic investments in clean data. Centering analyses of pre-fieldwork training sessions, research encounters between fieldworkers and respondents, and the tools and technologies employed by fieldworkers (maps, surveys, HIV tests, GPS devices, e.g.), I trouble racialized rhetoric dating from the colonial-era that casts fieldworkers and data collectors as unreliable, unskilled, or a liability to good data by showing how their embodied tactics and forms of expertise coalesce demographers’ standards for high quality data as they implement them in the field. The paper draws from a chapter of my larger book project, which shows how quantitative data reflect and cohere new social relations, persons, practices and forms of expertise in their sites of production.

Bio: Crystal Biruk is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College and a member of the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Committee at the College. Her research and scholarship is at the intersection of critical global health studies, science studies, and African studies. Her book project, titled Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World, is an ethnography of knowledge production in foreign-led survey projects collecting AIDS-related health data in rural Malawi. The book considers the social lives of quantitative data, and analyzes how data reflect and cohere the social worlds they claim to represent. Her second ethnographic project takes interest in the emergence of same-sex identities and evidence-based activism in Malawi, with particular focus on how LGBT people come to occupy, perform and know their vulnerability in the context of transnationally circulating human rights frames and global health science. She has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Pembroke Center in 2011-12. At Oberlin, she teaches courses in cultural theory, medical anthropology, science studies, and critical humanitarianism.