The Global Health Frontier: AIDS, Pedagogy, and Moral Transformation in Botswana

The book manuscript I seek support to finish argues that, rather than a set of institutional arrangements or moral commitments, global health is an imaginative framework that organizes the space, time, and ethics of encounter. Drawing on extensive ethnographic data, I trace the pedagogic practices through which global health emerged at the intersection of Botswana’s public HIV treatment program and private U.S.-based institutions. Providing a fine-grained account of patient education and bedside teaching, and linking these pedagogies to broader changes in biomedical training and humanitarianism, I demonstrate that global health’s coherence depends on visiting experts and their local counterparts, trainees, patients, and their families all shaping themselves and one another in accordance this imaginative framework. In short, global health’s subjects must learn to inhabit it, and conflicts ensue as individuals engage in and oppose efforts to distinguish global from local, expert from inexpert, and the present from the past.