The Pardee Center's Global Health Politics Workshop (GHPW) speaker series continues with a lecture by Ann Swidler, Professor of the Graduate Schoool, University of California, Berkeley, titled “Paved with Good Intentions: Global Health Policy & Dilemmas of Care in High Viral Load HIV Clinics in Malawi.”

Through in-depth fieldwork on HIV clinics, Swidler and colleagues analyze how global mandates can backfire when they ignore the constraints, resources, culture, and moral motivations of local actors. They argue that small-scale qualitative fieldwork has a role to play in influencing the large-scale quantitative data collection on which public health policy is based.

The GHPW is part of a two-year project convened by Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow Joseph Harris with the goal of bringing together leading social scientists from the disciplines of anthropology, political science, and sociology, along with practitioners in Boston and around the world, to advance the understanding of health phenomena in a globally interconnected world.