Pharmocracy Now: Constitutional Questions in Pandemic Times
Abstract
In this talk, I explore how the logics of global capital and national governance have combined to create particular kinds of health and political outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic in India. I build upon arguments in my book Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine (DUP, 2017) in order to think through the interplay between corporate interests and state action in global pharmaceutical politics. I will attend on the one hand to an overarching story of global vaccine inequity driven by the interests of the multinational pharmaceutical industry, and on the other hand to the multiple brokerage economies of healthcare that have come to structure the Indian pandemic marketplace. I situate governance responses in the context of these intersecting political economies, even as I examine how particular kinds of market terrains are produced by certain kinds of state action (and inaction). Thus, I consider the co-productions of value and politics and their consequences for both health and democracy.
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The talk will be followed by a roundtable discussion moderated by Dr. Cecilia Van Hollen, Teaching Professor in the Asian Studies Program. Lunch will be provided.
Please email kelly.liu@georgetown.edu for accommodation requests.
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Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. He works on the global political economy of the life sciences and biomedicine, with an empirical focus on India, South Africa and the United States. He is the author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (2006), Pharmocracy: Value, Politics and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine (2017), and Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis (2021). He is currently embarked on a research project that studies the intersections between health, law and constitutionalism in South Africa, provisionally titled “Just Health?: Law, Constitutionalism and Postcolonial Dis-ease”.
Cecilia Van Hollen is Teaching Professor in the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University. She social-cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in South Asia. Her research explores the intersections of class, caste and gender as women seek care for reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and cancer in Tamil Nadu. She is the author of Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (2003) and Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India (2013). Her first book received the Association for Asian Studies’ 2005 prize for the best book in South Asia Studies. She is currently completing a third ethnography, entitled Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Health and Inequality in South India, to be published by the University of California Press