Dr. Marlee Tichenor

My book project, Malarial Proximities, ethnographically explores questions of causality, etiology, responsibility, and accountability on multiple scales of the health fight against malaria in Senegal and at production sites of global health governance. As a concept, “malarial proximities” refers to the near-misses, approximations, and proxies of malarial evidence across difference and distance, as well as the ecological, conceptual, and institutional entanglements that a certain vision of malaria produces. Determining and reifying the proximities that matter in designing and implementing health interventions against malaria is the process by which malaria is defined and given solutions are justified. I argue that this proximity-making is crucial to the global health fight against malaria in particular, as well as to global health ventures in general, in three major ways. First, global malaria governance erases the complex, everyday proximities of malaria through the regulation of treatment, prevention, and diagnosis practices. Next, it depends on the proximities created, through advocacy, between the produced suffering, economically-rational individual who is the target of health interventions and global health development donors. Finally, it relies on the production of a proximate malaria through market and data modeling practices. Malaria is far more than a parasitic disease that can be known in the ways the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other global health organizations attempt to address it. Malarial parasites are dependent on the environmental milieu of both mosquito and human host, and malaria case and mortality rates are caught in the social, economic, and political conditions of populations.