Bio:
My work focuses on the epistemological and ethical dimensions of public health research. Drawing resources from history, philosophy, and science and technology studies, I investigate the production of scientific facts as mediated by material practices and as demonstrative of particular political imaginaries. My doctoral research followed the design of a clinical trial from funding application to formalized protocol. In that project, I attempted to situate the notion of public good advanced by the NHS and to articulate how that cultural framing inflects techniques of scientific aggregation. At stake in this project were, on one hand, the methodological tensions that divide scientific information from medical utility and, on the other, the reflexive opportunities for anthropology implied by that interplay. Departing from anthropologies of science that contextualize scientific practices so as to analyze the diverse interests that underwrite authoritative claims, I reset clinical research and ethnography as analogous inductive strategies.
Since completing my doctorate, I have extended my interest in the correlation between good research and the goods of research into African contexts. Funded by the Wellcome Trust Bioethics Research Fellowship, my current work compares the experiences of local fieldworkers employed by international research projects in The Gambia and in Tanzania. Putting anthropology of science into conversation with development studies, I have sought to scrutinize the everyday entanglements that link study populations to networks of global capital and transform research projects into social progress. A guiding aim of this project is to equip bioethics with analytical tools that can take into account the moral worlds and political realities of global public health – a task, which, I believe, must begin by giving empirical texture to the ecologies of knowledge that shape and are shaped by scientific research.
A second and related line of inquiry involves the significance of place and materiality in public health research. How the built-environments and landscapes of science come to matter raises questions about the mobile and immobile aspects of knowledge production. One fascinating experimental artifact that has captured my ethnographic attention is the experimental hut. A classic instrument of entomological research, these domestic semi-field spaces are used to model the shared ecological reality of parasites, vectors and humans in malaria research and to pilot public health interventions. The physical histories and social lives of these modeling exercises illuminate the co-evolution of practices of modernization and experimentation, and the processes by which science is at once universalized and domesticated.
Projects:
Comparative Ethnographic Study of Clinical Research Collaborations in East and West Africa (Wellcome Trust Bioethics Research Fellowship)
My current research takes its theoretical orientation from my doctoral work on publicly-funded clinical research based in UK into the context of Bioscientific Research in Africa. Most broadly, I am concerned with what constitutes “good science” in the context of health delivery how clinical trials generate reliable evidence and public good. My empirical focus is two large scale larval control trials conducted under the auspices of the UK Medical Research Council’s (MRC) laboratories in the Gambia and in collaboration with the Ifakara’s Health Institute(IHI) in Tanzania. The Larval Control Project (LCP) was conducted in rural villages located on the north and the south banks of the River Gambia and the Urban Malaria Control Project (UMCP), which consisted in the application of larvicide to aquatic habitats in the neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam. With their large number of staff, complicated protocols, labour intensive research activities and distinct landscapes of intervention, these projects provided an ideal comparative framework to explore the complex systems of value that exist between the context and destinations of inquiry. Exploring the ways in which these research animate public health infrastructures, I have interrogated the significances of urban and rural space to scientific and public health practice – how in, short the how do the circulations of science – from laboratory to field station, metropolis to rural hospital – relate to the geography of wellbeing. In particular, I have interrogated the modes of civic response and responsibility, the notions of democracy, the localizations of the public, and spatial and social reconfigurations required to manage the aggregations and flows of human, parasite and mosquito populations. Elaborating a theoretical engagement with pragmatism that began in my dissertation, I consider the intellectual and political experiments that emerge around ‘frontier encounters’ – sites of wild abundance and radical uncertainty.
I am currently expanding this research into a broader analysis of the roots and reach of scientific engagements in ‘the tropics’. With colleagues working in the History of Science (REHSEIS) Laboratory at the University of Paris Diderot and the “VIH-Sida et Maladies Associées” at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Senegal, I have recently applied for funding to investigate the “realms of memory” of medical research in contemporary Africa. Comparing a range of case studies located in French and English-speaking Africa, we seek to develop an innovative theoretical and methodological approach to understanding the ways in which biomedical research generates memory and how its practices are remembered, memorialized and commemorated in institutions, populations and artifacts.
Replacing DDT: Rigorous Evaluation of Spatial Repellents for the Control of Vector Borne Diseases (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
While conducting research in Tanzania, a member of the public health entomology team working in Ifakara invited me to collaborate on a project to develop effective and culturally acceptable household insecticides as an alternative DDT. This project, which received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, plans to use experimental hut systems in Ifakara and in Contou Benin to develop novel products and test their effectiveness. My role will be to provide supervision for students and conduct interviews with rural users in Tanzania and Benin, users in manufacturers’ target groups in developed and developing nations, as well as among industry decision makers to identify desirable characteristics of delivery formats for these spatial repellents.
The most important aspect of the work at LSHTM has been the partnerships I have developed with students and researchers in Africa. As a collaborator and consultant with the public health entomology group in Tanzania, I am hoping to help design a PhD in social ecology as part of an integrated disease vector management program. Combining expertise in entomology, biology, public health, anthropology, history, and ethics, this initiative will develop projects that explore the social value of research in the broadest possible sense.
Publications:
2011. Kelly, A.H. & Geissler, P.W. INTRODUCTION - The value of transnational medical research. Journal of Cultural Economy, 4(1), 3-10. download here
2011. Kelly, A.H. "Will he be there? Mediating malaria, immobilizing science". Journal of Cultural Economy, 4(1), 65-79. download here
2011. Kelly, A.H. & Beisel U. "Neglected Malarias: The Frontlines and Back Alleys of Global Health", BioSocieties 6(1):71-87 download here
In Press. Kelly, A.H. "Fact-Making and Pragmatic Populations: RCT's in UK and The Gambia" in C. Will and T. Moreira (ed) Medical Proofs, Social experiments: Clinical Trials in Shifting Contexts, Oxfod: Ashgate
In Press. Kelly, A.H. "The 'Project' of Medical Research: Experimental Publics in The Gambia", in T. Yarrow and S. Venkatasan (eds) Differentiating Development: Beyond an Anthropology of Critique, Kumerian Press: Bloomfield, CT
In Press. Kelly, A.H. "Towards an Entomological Anthropology Model Huts and Fieldworks" in Edwards J. & Petrovic-Steger.(eds.) M. Inspiring Knowledge: Essays in Honor of Marilyn Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2010. Kirby, M.; Bah, P. Jones, C., Kelly, A.H.; Jasseh, M., Lindsay, S. "Social Acceptability and Durability of Two Different House Screening Interventions Against Exposure to Malaria Vectors, Plasmodium falciparum Infection and Anaemia in Children in The Gambia, West Africa". American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, 83 (5): 965-972
2010. Kelly,AH. Pinder, M., Ameh D., Majambere S.,Lindsay, S. “Like Sugar and Honey”: The embedded ethics of a larval control project in The Gambia, Social Science & Medicine,70(12): 1912-1919.
2008. Kelly, AH. "Pragmatic Evidence and the Politics of Everyday Practice". Timm Lau, Casey High and Liliana Chau (eds.) Questions of evidence - ethnography and anthropological forms of knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars publishing.
2008. Geissler, P. W., Kelly, AH. Pool, R. Imoukhuede, B. “He is now like a brother, I can even give him some blood” relational ethics and material exchanges in a malaria vaccine trial community in The Gambia. Social Science and Medicine,67:5: 698- 707.
2008 Pinder, M.; Majambere, S.; Ameh, D.; Jeffries, D.; Jawara, M.; Kelly, AH.; Green, C.; Hutchinson,R.; Conway, D.; Lindsay, S. Impact of Larviciding on Malaria in the Gambia,American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 2008; 79(6):793
2003. Kelly, AH Research and the Subject: The Practice of Informed Consent. PoLAR. 26(2):182-195.
Book Reviews
In Press. Kelly, AH. Review of The Human Guinea Pig. Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute.
In Press. Kelly, AH. Review of The Objects of Evidence, Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute.
2009. Kelly AH. AIDS on the Scale of the Social. Biosocieties4(1): 99-103.
2005. Kelly, AH. Review of Heather Paxson's Making Modern Mothers, PoLAR. 29 (2): 286-290
