Event location
Guest Speaker Seminars will take place at Seminar Room 218, FHH (Frederik Holsts hus), 12:15-13:30.
Zoom link for those wishing to attend online.
Abstract
In this presentation, I examine a digital platform used in the primary health sector in a state in Eastern India, which combines three dimensions: making healthcare accessible in rural areas, surveilling the population to prevent, identify, and monitor non-communicable diseases, and managing the performance of the health workforce. Similar to other digital platforms in the social service sector, it is seen to foster accountability. Based on research in rural health centers, the state’s “telemedicine hub” as well as administrative offices, I analyze the promise of digital technologies as technologies of accountability and show how digital audit of health workers affects the provision of healthcare. I argue that, even though digital technologies and the managerial form of governance they engender are supposed to increase efficiency of the health sector and legibility of the population, they – paradoxically – lead to inefficiency and opacity. Yet, digital audit projects an image of order and success which displaces attention from the pressing structural issues that India’s health sector has been facing for decades.
Bio:
Sandra Bärnreuther is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Her research focuses on medical ethnology at. Bärnreuther is currently working on a research project which explores transformations of the Indian healthcare sector through processes of digitization and financialization. Her previous ethnographic and historical research on reproductive medicine in India resulted in the book Substantial Relations: Making Global Reproductive Medicine in Postcolonial India (Cornell University Press, 2021).