Seminar Conveners: Dr Alex Aylward, Professor Erica Charters, Dr Hohee Cho, Professor Mark Harrison, Professor Rob Iliffe, Dr Catherine M Jackson, Dr Sloan Mahone
Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Ann Kelly (Oxford)
Cressida Jervis Read Seminar
Along the Thread of the Mosquito Ovary: Apprehending Malarias Lost and Regained
In the early 1960s, Soviet researchers attempted to assist the WHO’s Global Malaria Eradication Programme (GMEP) by offering training in the Polovodova method—an infamously exacting dissection method used to determine the physiological age of a female mosquito by examining structural changes in its ovary, and by extension, their disease carrying capacity. The efforts to deploy this technique to assess the success of pilot indoor DDT-spraying schemes in Africa provides a compelling case of the trade-offs between what is knowable and what is doable in large-scale disease control. I suggest that the staggered circulation of the Polovodova technique provides a lens onto the shifting epidemiological conjugations of entomological knowledge across the long durée of malaria control programmes and, more broadly, the ways in which logics of contagion come to demarcate the field of scientific vision.
Anne H Kelly is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She has led multiple transdisciplinary collaborations at the intersections of infectious disease control, health systems strengthening, and emergency R&D, and serves as a member of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) for Ebola Vaccines and Vaccination. Her ethnographic engagement in those projects has been driven by an abiding concern with the socio-material conditions that structure the production of biomedical knowledge, the local ecologies of labour that circumscribe its circulation and use and the ethical imaginaries that animate collective responses to health crises. She is currently leading a collaboration with scientists, designers, architects and masons in Tanzania, the United States, and Brazil to unsettle entrenched models of ‘equitable access’ for mosquito control technologies.
