Between tangled diagnoses and imperfect pregnancies: controversies and uncertainties in Brazil's response to the Zika virus epidemic

• Grant number: 20/11934-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2021
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Maria Conceição da Costa
• Grantee: Jonatan Jackson Sacramento
• Supervisor: Ilana Zelmanowicz
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale, Société (Cermes3), France
• Associated to the scholarship: 18/06547-5 - Politics of knowledge, politics of difference: an ethnography of institutional responses to the Zika Virus, BP.DR

Abstract

This proposal aims to analyse Brazil's establishment of public health policies and its development of scientific research to fight the Zika virus and microcephaly epidemic it went through from 2015 to 2016. It also aims to understand the public health policies and the scientific research both as biopower technologies and as subparts of a larger whole of governance of science and of public health. Our goal is thereby to comprehend how medical uncertainties and sociotechnical controversies have built the Brazilian response to the epidemic in a context of sanitary emergency. To this end, we shall analyse the actions of the Plano Nacional de Enfrentamento à Microcefalia, an inter-ministerial strategy launched by the Brazilian government at the end of 2015. We hypothesise that the uncertainties, the controversies and the sanitary emergency have mutually built one another in the epidemic context and have been embedded by gender. (AU)