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Accepted Paper:

Vaccine as a commodity to run the ship of relations in Pakistan  
Inayat Ali (Fatima Jinnah Women University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider vaccine as a commodity which affects –makes or breaks – the ship of relations among various stakeholders especially in Pakistan.

Paper long abstract:

Vaccination, in general and in Pakistan in particular, is one among the highly circulated commodities in the world and having highly socio-political consequences such as making and breaking of relationships between global donors and national governments; between federal governments and provincial governments; between governments and citizens and so forth. The relation-ships run – make or break – through the help of numbers and beliefs. The global donors, e.g. WHO gives guidelines and funds, the national governments obeys and receives and it continues at the local level. The local people refuse on the basis of certain beliefs, which most of the time never reach at the global level. It means the vaccine affects the ship horizontally and vertically.

This paper, therefore, will address how ‘science of numbers’ affects the relationships in terms of cases identified, children covered, families refused, children died due to no-vaccination and after due to vaccination. Further, it will talk about how a ‘fake’ vaccine was circulated in the country in order to know the hideouts of Osma-bin-Ladin, which later on exacerbated the ship of relations among above-mentioned stakeholders. The data is based on my PhD fieldwork in Pakistan, which I conducted in 2013 onwards.

Panel WIM-GF07
The political life of commodities: a reflection on the contemporary circulation of "things" and resulting social and political transformations
  Session 1