Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches the mobilities of and connections between things, knowledge, and people as an infrastructure. We focus on infrastructural fragmentations characteristic for global health and approach these fragmentations through „thick comparison“

Paper long abstract:

In our paper we aim to reconstruct mobility and connectivity as problems of global health infrastructure. Drawing on recent scholarly debates on infrastructure we approach connections between and mobility of things, knowledge, and people as characteristics of infrastructure of care. Our paper is based on our research on HIV treatment, Malaria treatment, and health systems in Uganda. We are particularly interested in the fragmentations of public health services created by the vast number of projects. The main part of our paper argues that infrastructural fragmentations do not only undermine reliability of data and stability of institutions expected from the provision of care. Instead fragmentations underwrite that context - usually defined in terms diseases, populations, or regions - does not exist independently. Contexts are produced and comparison needs to provide an understanding of the production of fragmentation itself. To fully understand these fragmentations we first propose to examine how practices of infrastructuring shape new forms of mobility and connectivity. Here, infrastructuring captures how people insert agency into the techno-bureaucratic apparatus of global health by creating an own infrastructure of care under conditions of uncertainty. Secondly, we approach the diversity of practices of infrastructuring as an object of "thick comparison" (Scheffer and Niewöhner 2010). Following Scheffer and Niewöhner we understand a thick comparison as a contribution to the theory of comparison. To situate our account of thick comparison we will review medical anthropological literature on comparisons in and of global health.