Social Science Research Council

“The Politics of Knowledge Production in Collaborative AIDS Research in Malawi”

While working on a collaborative AIDS research project in Malawi in 2005, I was struck by the noticeable differences in how the risk of contracting AIDS was interpreted by members of the research team, despite their shared research agenda, protocols, and directives.  What this suggested to me was not simply that scientific inquiry is inherently social but rather that collaboration is inevitably paradoxical.  Collaborative research entails a central contradiction between the need for a unified agenda and the panoply of cultural viewpoints that aspire to be incorporated. This contradiction points to a question central to this particular project and to the conduct of collaborative research more generally: In the face of contrasting and possibly discordant presuppositions concerning the central focus of research, how does one (or more) of them gain legitimacy?  

Donors and national governments increasingly insist that research be collaborative and culturally relevant, yet they lack detailed knowledge of how different understandings of culture, and especially in the case of AIDS, different understandings of risk, are negotiated in the context of research practice.  While collaborative research may begin with varying interpretations across collaborators, during the research process certain interpretive explanations are taken as authoritative.  My research considers how different constructions of risk are produced and communicated among various levels of international AIDS research in Malawi.  How are diverse theories and perspectives of risk produced, challenged, or confirmed as authoritative knowledge in the interactions among expatriate researchers, national collaborators, intermediaries, and village residents in Malawi? This research contributes to a growing body of literature concerned with the articulation of ‘expert’ and ‘local’ knowledge, with the anthropology of bureaucracy, and with the social relations and power structures that comprise the growing presence of international research in Africa.