[Air-L] Crystal Biruk discusses her new book, Cooking Data

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Crystal Biruk talks with Sheng Long about her new book, Cooking 
Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World
on the CaMP anthropology blog:

https://campanthropology.org <https://campanthropology.org/>

Best,
Ilana

The press blurb:
In/Cooking Data/Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research 
into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the 
production of quantitative health data. While research practices are 
often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data 
are never clean; rather, they are always “cooked” during 
their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who 
produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, 
supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk 
examines the ways in which units of information—such as survey questions 
and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers—acquire value as 
statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach 
illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the 
production of global health statistics in ways that impact local 
economies and formulations of power and expertise.