Alice Street

Professor of Anthropology and Health

Alice.Street@ed.ac.uk

+44 (0)131 6515573

After the Single Use

https://www.linkedin.com/in/Alice Street/

G.1

22 George Square

Edinburgh

EH8 9LD

Research interests

Energy, environment and sustainability Global health policy Health & Well-being Health inequalities, disability and older people Historical approaches to science, technology and medicine Innovation in life sciences (agriculture, food and health) Science, technology and innovation Social studies of biology and medicine Studies of the life sciences

I received my PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2008. I held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Nuffield New Career Development Fellowship at the University of Sussex until 2013 when I joined the University of Edinburgh as a Chancellor's Fellow. I have published widely on the anthropology of global health interventions, medical institutions and medical innovation and am the author of the academic monograph Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Hospital, published by Duke University Press. I am Principal Investigator of DiaDev, a six year research programme to investigate the design and use of diagnostic devices in global health, funded by the European Research Council.

Topics interested in supervising

I am interested in supervising students working in the areas of anthropology of waste, sustainable healthcare, biomedicine, hospital ethnography, global health innovation, and anthropology of the state. I have experience carrying out research in Melanesia, South Asia and West Africa.

If you are interested in being supervised by Alice Street, please see the links below (open in new windows) for more information:

Background

Health Care Sustainability

My current research focuses on the material politics of health care waste. I am Principal Investigator of the Wellcome Discovery Award 'After the Single Use', a collaboration across eight countries that explores the history, present and futures of plastics in healthcare. Current health systems are premised on the manufacture, transportation and disposal of millions of tons of single-use plastic products every year. I am interested in how we came to build this linear economy of health care, what impacts it is having on people, and what people are trying to do to solve this problem. I work with biomedical engineers to explore how social science and engineering knowledge can be brought together in order to develop more sustainable and equitable global health innovation systems.

Investigating Diagnostic Devices in Global Health

The DiaDev project, Investigating the Design and Use of Diagnostic Devices in Global Health, explored the emergent role that diagnostic devices are playing in the transformation of global health partnerships and national health systems in low and middle-income countries. Drawing on conceptual and methodological tools from social anthropology, it investigated the social, cultural and technical processes involved in developing, deploying and using diagnostic devices in resource-limited settings. The goal is to improve our understanding of relationships between technological innovation and health systems strengthening, with a view to guiding global health policy.

Hospitals in Resource-Limited Settings

Research on hospitals in resource-limited settings explores the ways in which people engage with biomedical technologies in conditions of uncertainty and precariousness. My book, Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital was published by Duke University Press.

Global Health in Fragile States

Research on global health governance has examined the ways in which managerial technologies travel to places of state absence or fragility. I am interested in the ways in which managerial knowledge practices have increasingly underpinned global health in recent years and the emergence of management as form of a state-building in an era of securitisation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a government health office it has examined issues of bureaucratic materiality and managerial personhood and expertise.

Humanitarian Goods

Research on 'Off the Grid' infrastructures examines the relationships that are built into and sustain physical infrastructures for health in locations that are beyond the reach of centrally planned public infrastructures. I examine “humanitarian goods”, such as rapid diagnostic kits or fortified foods, that are developed through public-private partnerships as technical solutions to fragile health systems. In 2013 I was awarded one of the ESRC’s first grants under its new ‘Transforming Social Science’ scheme for a comparative study of infrastructures for living “off the grid”.