Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Norman Schräpel (Halle)
Information and Communication Technologies, Medical Data Production and the Politics of Global Health in Rwanda
Medical care in Africa is characterized by massive lacks in infrastructures, including the insufficient quantity of health personnel, the unreliable supply of drugs or equipment. This often leads to poor outcomes of care and consequently health issues become major burdens for whole societies. Biomedicine in turn has become a complex apparatus, depending on sophisticated technologies and expert knowledge. During the last years the government of Rwanda invested enormously in the installment of new medical data infrastructures to address these challenges. New (and older) technologies (e.g. register books, forms, lists, and databases) are supposed to promote efficiency, accuracy and accountability within Rwanda’s health system and improve the quality of care. This problematization of health (e.g. overcoming lacks of data, gaining accessible data, having good data, etc.) by the Rwandan government can be read as the local rendering of a continually growing global emphasis on medical information systems in the reorganization and ‘rationalization’ of health care, but also as a domain specific expression of a wider contemporary national-elitist ambition of ‘modernizing Rwanda’ by deploying information and communication technologies (ICTs). Thus fixing the gaps in Rwanda’s health infrastructures is translated as a matter of deploying new technologies to produce medical data. In offering an ethnographic perspective the research project concentrates on two of the eight Millennium Development Goals (# 4 & 5) and how they are proliferating these (new) medical realms. The case study follows the paths of medical data to the places where they are produced: a local health facility and an extensive network of community health workers in Rwanda and documents the practices that emerge around and with them. This is to make visible the techno-scientific transformations of biomedicine in Rwanda and how global health networks are co-constituted in this process.
Norman Schräpel studied Social Anthropology, Psychology and Linguistics in Halle and Jena. His Magister thesis Rendering Technologies – Re-building South Africa’s health system through information and communication technologies was based on six months of fieldwork in Cape Town. Since 2010 he is a junior researcher at the University Halle, employed by the DFG Priority Program 1448 Adaptation and Creativity in Africa. He recently finished one year of fieldwork for his Ph.D. project on Rwanda.
His main research interests are medical data infrastructures, health in Africa, Science and Technology Studies