Colloquium, March 1 – Jenna Grant – Friends, Partners, and Orphans

About the event

Dr. Jenna Grant: Friends, Partners, and Orphans

This talk juxtaposes three moments of medical infrastructure and technology aid in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: 1960, 2010, and 2005. The operative terms of these moments are relationship terms: friendship, partnership, and the orphan. My objective is to illuminate layers of history and technopolitics in global health partnerships, as well as the sometimes toxic sediments of these relations. Technopolitics involves inequalities that cause machines to circulate—as gifts, as commodities—and inequalities that result from these circulations. Technopolitics also signals how the materiality of technologies enacts a politics. Friends give new hospital buildings and machines. But are friends responsible for their care and decay? Obligations are unclear in a world in which friends no longer exist, yet the hospitals they build, and machines they give, remain.

Jenna Grant is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Washington, where she teaches anthropology of medicine, technology, and visuality in Cambodia and its borderlands. Dr. Grant heads the University of Washington’s Medical Anthropology and Global Health Program, and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Seeing clearly: Medical imaging and its uncertainties in Phnom Penh.

All are welcome to attend!