Assistant Professor of Anthropology (PhD: Rice, 2004)
office: Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway (SBSG) 3336
phone: (949) 824-9652
email: kris at uci dot edu
RESEARCH
I am a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests focus on international political economy, policy-making, intellectual property law, and science, health, and medicine. Through the lens of HIV/AIDS politics, my work engages the problem of “development” as a strategy and framework that is intertwined with the restructuring of markets, ideas of state legitimacy and the law, and re-imagined desires for, and practices of, citizenship. These topical and theoretical concerns are grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nigeria; newer work is beginning to extend to Malawi, Ghana, Cameroon, France, and the U.S.
Several stratified yet related projects attempt to work through my overarching
research concerns. The first queries the genealogy and logics of current
AIDS policies in Nigeria. I analyze how the (1980s) global restructuring
of states and drug markets combined with civic and transnational activism
that demanded accessibility to AIDS drugs, have generated new treatment
rationalizations and projects. Beyond the aegis of statecraft and market
logics, this research seeks to understand how AIDS policies materialize
in broader political economies, including militarism and extraction, that
are tied to Cold War histories, neoliberal reforms, and postcolonial futures.
A second research project, which is being supported by the National Science
Foundation, examines HIV related clinical trials in several African countries.
It specifically examines how differing forms of state privatization in
both the US as well as African countries facilitate increased transnational
flows of clinical molecules and growing sites of experimental research.
Within this framework, a new science-humanitarian-development industry
apparatus is subsidizing HIV related clinical trials while harnessing
new kinds of capital and human mobility in the form of clinical molecules
and human subjects. As a result, debates are emerging throughout Africa
that reflect radically different sets of ethics not simply at the level
of researcher-human subject interactions but also at the level of representation,
where scientific rationales, informed consent procedures, and study designs
are consistent points of contention.
Expanding on the latter two projects, ongoing research investigates the U.S. President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in Nigeria. This study examines PEPFAR’s facilitation of clinical trial institutional expansion; it also examines the subsidization of U.S. and Nigerian militaries, and US foundations and social marketing firms who play different roles in distributing treatment to over 100,000 HIV positive Nigerians. This research project on PEPFAR highlights three interrelated and key points used to pose new questions about liberalism and political economy in a post-9/11 era: 1) the potentially changing biology of HIV (i.e., drug resistant viral strains) that is generated by the PEPFAR policy itself, which includes both pharmaceutical interaction and ultimately treatment interruption when the program ends; 2) new forms of accumulation rising out of future biological outcomes of HIV, which contribute to reorganizing the global humanitarian industry and its corporate and military alliances; and 3) the prospect of expanding both U.S. and Nigerian militarism via subsidized U.S. branded drugs in an time of heightened concern for security and oil supplies in West Africa.
Outside of research, I am the national co-chair for the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (www.concernedafricascholars.org, along with Sean Jacobs at the University of Michigan), an affiliate organization of the African Studies Association. In my non-existent spare time, I contribute to the Coyote Radio Collective (Santa Barbara-Los Angeles) and am an occasional commentator on Pacifica Radio; I write poetry, am fascinated by politics, play with my camera (www.flickr.com/photos/basira/), and can be found in bottomless-cup cafes.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
“Rethinking Health Policies: AIDS, the US, and Africa.” Association of Concerned Africa Scholars Bulletin. Volume 74, 2006.
“Benefit Sharing for All?: Bioprospecting NGOs, Intellectual Property Rights, New Governmentalities.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 24:1 (May 2001): 78-91.
“Belongings,” in The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries, edited by James D. Faubion. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, 234-249.
“Romancing the Shelter: The State, Activism, and Domestic Violence Funding.” Minnesota Review, 50-51 (October 1999): 63-73.
Under revision
“AIDS Policies for Markets and Warriors: Dispossession, Capital, and Pharmaceuticals
in Nigeria,” in Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics and Governance
in Global Markets. Ed. Kaushik Sunder Rajan. Duke University Press.
Under review
Kristin Peterson. “Phantom Epistemologies” in The End(s) of Fieldwork:
Anthropology's Signature Method in Transition. Ed. George E. Marcus.
In preparation
“Ethical Misrecognition: The Tenofovir PrEP Debates in Nigeria and a New
Mobilization Framework for Global Clinical Trials” (with Morenike Folayan).
“The Trials of Tenofovir in Nigeria: Mobilizing Ethics, Markets, and Clinical Molecules.”
“Governance, Ethics, and the Tenofovir Trials in Nigeria.” Changing States of Science: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Government, Citizenship and Medical Research in Contemporary Africa. Ed. Paul Wenzel Geissler.
“AIDS Activism and Policies in Nigeria: The Making of Experts and Economies.” Transnational Medicine, Mobile Experts: Globalization, Health and Power In & Beyond Africa. Eds. Hansjörg Dilger, Abdoulaye Kane and Stacey Langwick.