Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores complicities and compliances produced at the intersections between the intensification of research governance, and the economies and infrastructures generated by the growth of transnational research partnerships, as anthropologists aim to make Covid research collaborations work.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we focus on two distinct developments that have significantly impacted research in medical anthropology over the past few decades: 1) the intensification of research governance as its scope has extended from ethics to risk to ‘data’ itself, and 2) the growth of transnational collaborative research partnerships and the new economies and infrastructures they have generated. While both of these developments have been the focus of considerable research and commentary, the intersections between them have been less well studied – although the Covid pandemic has served to throw their enmeshment into sharp relief. Taking the form of a dialogue, we move back and forth between Nadine’s recent experience of applying for ethics approval for a collaborative study in a sub-Saharan African country on the UK’s Covid red list and Kirsten’s broader observations about transformations in research governance as someone who has worked within its machinery for decades. We highlight the conflicts and complicities anthropologists experience as they aim to ‘make it work’ in the face of ever-more complex institutional and national governance frameworks, transnational research partnerships embedded in broader structures of inequality, and in-country staff whose livelihoods depend on precarious employment in project-funded positions.