Amid ongoing debates regarding the politics and economics of global health financing and sustainability, 'emerging markets' and 'South-South' relations are increasingly figured as sites of health care innovation. Calls for universal health coverage have expanded public and private insurance schemes for low income patients, for instance, while new models of 'high volume, low cost' care have driven the expansion of private hospitals across South Asia and Africa. At the same time, emerging market and technological formations are indelibly shaped by colonial and postcolonial medicine and politics, and by contemporary global health markets. This talk takes three objects - the factory, the generic, and the pharmacy - to explore the complex corporate and state transnationalisms through which medical goods and markets are materialised in Maputo, Mozambique. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research in Maputo and other sites in and beyond the African continent, it asks how Mozambican patients, consumers, and health workers are incorporated into a rapidly growing but deeply unequal global medical economy.
About the Speaker
Ramah McKay is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University and is the author of Medicine in the Meantime: The work of care in Mozambique, published in 2018 by Duke University Press. Her current research explores the construction of transnational medical markets in and beyond Mozambique. Exploring how notions of a global medical market are constructed, this project examines how patients and providers on and from the African continent navigate these emergent modes of transnational care. Her talk will be related to this ongoing research. A second collaborative project examines the re-emergence of population as a problem of governance, reproduction, environment, and knowledge-making in the context of climate change, economic instability, and political violence in Mozambique.