Paper short abstract:

This rather unorthodox paper is a conversation with an epidemiologist who was the director of HIV Research for a large state run clinical research centre in Kenya and a co-investigator on a collaborative ethnographic project exploring medical field studies, or ‘trial communities,’ in western Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

This rather unorthodox paper is a conversation between an anthropologist and an epidemiologist who was the director of HIV Research for a large state run clinical research centre in Kenya and a co-investigator on a collaborative ethnographic project exploring medical field studies, or 'trial communities,' in western Kenya. The large-scale collaborative ethnography was a study of a collaborative medical research centre in western Kenya involving multiple partners from Kenya and the USA. Thus, at the centre of this conversation is a question about the pragmatics of what 'collaboration' represents in different disciplines and how it is enacted. The dialogue, a post-research follow up interview, highlights the expectations and tensions in such collaborative projects and offers the epidemiologist an opportunity to highlight the ideas, methods, and possibilities that he perceived as being 'lost in translation' between socio-cultural anthropology and experimental medicine. He raises critical issues regarding the disjuncture between epidemiological and anthropological practices in research design, methods, epistemology, and collaboration, and speaks about his disillusionment with the overall experience of working with anthropologists. The paper works as an interrogation into collaborative practices and conceptual interdisciplinarity, and raises questions regarding the ethics, politics, and practicalities of studying experimental medicine as collaboration. The conversation is contextualized within my own 15-year history of fieldwork on collaborative ethnographic projects in HIV/AIDS science and debates and discussions with collaborators on these projects.