Current Projects

Funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), our project uses antibiotics and benzodiazepines as similar-but-contrasting cases and an integrated anthropology-public health approach to investigate their prescription, circulation, and use. Our aim is to develop an ethnographically grounded, expert-validated policy blueprint with an implementation model for de-prescribing the medications – where it is necessary and advisable, and where it is not – at the macro (policy), meso (institutions), and micro (provider/patient) level to explore as-yet invisible social arenas, close the data gap, and mitigate unwanted side-effects.

Existing policies focus on guidelines for providers and indirect user regulation. Yet, little is known about provider and user experience or circulation pathways – pharmaceuticals’ “cultural efficacy” – which could inform a more context-sensitive, evidence-based policy approach.

The project collects quantitative and qualitative data on pharmaceutical prescription, circulation, use, and develops workable models, regulations, and guidelines for evaluating and using pharmaceuticals with a stakeholder-driven co-creation approach.

For my dissertation project at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University, I use the case study of Hepatitis C and its novel cure, direct-acting antivirals (DAAs), as a lens through which to challenge the idea that cure and health are matters related in direct and uncomplicated ways. I leverage two-years of ethnographic engagement in Vienna, Austria, during a transitional moment in the history of Hepatitis C, when a cure for this intractable viral infectious liver disease was introduced, to understand how the cure was governed and implemented, how it traveled between care institutions and their clients, and how it was embodied, lived, and experienced in the everyday. I interweave analyses of the biopolitics of governing life in the welfare state and the translation of the science of the virus into public health policy with phenomenological accounts of how care extends through state and non-state institutions and how people experience the disease, becoming healthy, and the underlying moral economy of a European welfare state. The cure for Hepatitis C, and curative modes of health-making more generally, emerge therein as always-already liminal: intermediate and generative, but not all-encompassing and absolute. Bringing those threads together, I ask what kind of care and what forms of health become, or do not become, available with cure, what the role of the welfare state is (and could be) in mediating the relationship of individuals to the bio-pharmaceutical industrial complex, and finally, how (more) livable futures and good forms of health may be crafted in the Anthropocene.

Sex Work & Health in Austria

Together with the Community Health Lab at the Medical University of Vienna and social organizations in Vienna, I am currently developing a project around health needs, governance and understandings of health in the context of sex work in Vienna, Austria…