Today I talk with anthropologist Adia Benton.
Adia Benton is a cultural anthropologist at Northwestern University with interests in global health, biomedicine, development/humanitarianism and professional sports.
She writes frequently on her blog, ethnography911.org, and on twitter (as ethnography911), connecting these issues with broader conversations about political economy, race and gender.
Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota, 2015), explores the treatment of AIDS as an exceptional disease and the recognition and care that this takes away from other diseases and public health challenges in poor countries.
Her second book, The Fever Archive, is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. It is a series of essays about the 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic, focusing on the militarization of public health response, US biosecurity and the global war on terror, and what I have called the “racial immuno-logics” of triage and the politics of care.