Cooking data : culture and politics in an African research world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Cooking data : culture and politics in an African research world
(Critical global health : evidence, efficacy, ethnography)
Duke University Press, 2018
- : hardcover
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]-268) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always "cooked" during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information-such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers-acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. An Anthropologist among the Demographers: Assembling Data in Survey Research Worlds 1
1. The Office in the Field: Building Survey Infrastructures 31
2. Living Project to Project: Brokering Local Knowledge in the Field 67
3. Clean Data, Messy Gifts: Soap-for-Information Transactions in the Field 100
4. Materializing Clean Data in the Field 129
5. When Numbers Travel: The Politics of Making Evidence-Based Policy 166
Conclusion. Anthropology in and of (Critical) Global Health 200
Appendix. Sample Household Roster Questions 217
Notes 223
Bibliography 237
Index 269
by "Nielsen BookData"