Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways transnational medical research and intervention in rural Kenya provides a structuring reference point for opportunity-out-of-reach that interplays with the visions and ambitions of youth who dream of, but can’t access its’ formal economic opportunities.

Paper long abstract:

What hopes and dreams unite and divide a human-landing catcher sitting outside his hut late at night sucking mosquitoes off his legs, a medical research fieldworker developing a model tree farm in the village where he works and the members of an impoverished community-based organisation laying a physical foundation-stone for a million-dollar dream AIDs orphanage that never comes? In a group of small villages in Western Kenyan transnational medical research and intervention has been an everyday feature of the social, physical and economic landscape for more than 30 years. Extremely high HIV prevalence, an ongoing health and demographic surveillance project and associated research programme based on transnational medical research collaborations ensures that medical research and intervention activities are the biggest provider of formal employment, material resources, new infrastructure and cash-flow in an area otherwise characterised by an informal and subsistence farming economy. Exposure to the city, to cosmopolitan living, class inequality and the wider world is carried into the village through these flows of people, resources, ideas and styles. This paper explores the ways medical research and intervention, therefore, provides a structuring reference point for endless potential opportunity and opportunity-out-of-reach that interplays with the dreams and ambitions of the majority of youth living in these villages who dream of, but can't access, either medical research's formal economic opportunities or former avenues to stability through education and government/industry employment.