Politics of knowledge, politics of difference: an ethnography of Zika virus epidemic production processes in Brazil

Author(s)

Jonatan Jackson Sacramento

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2023-07-13

Examining board members

Maria Conceição da Costa; Guita Grin Debert; Sergio Luis Carrara; Deisy de Freitas Lima Ventura; Jean Segata

• Advisor: Maria Conceição da Costa; Ilana Löwy

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the construction processes of the Zika virus epidemic as a health emergency. By employing an ethnography of documents and in conjunction with debates from Gender Studies (primarily an feminist perspective on science), Anthropology of Health, and Social Studies of Science and Technology, the purpose of this text is to understand how the production of health policies (the documents, understood as an emic category) and the production of scientific policies (the documents, understood as an analytic category) are mobilised in the production of responses to the epidemic and in the construction of the phenomenon of health emergency itself. Starting from the idea of the "Zika case", both an epidemiological and sociological unit, and its objectification, neutralisation and universalisation processes, I discuss how practices of classification, counting, testing and modelling are essential in shaping responses to the epidemic within a health logic that understands state processes as caring practices. My hypothesis is that such phenomena give form and meaning to panics and moral economies, as well as receive a form and meaning from these panics and these economies, of which gender meanings and their relations are the central guiding axis (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 18/06547-5 - Politics of knowledge, politics of difference: an ethnography of institutional responses to the Zika Virus
• Grantee: Jonatan Jackson Sacramento
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate