David Reubi | King's College London (original) (raw)

Books by David Reubi

Metrics have become all pervasive in global health today. Instead of highlighting their advantage... more Metrics have become all pervasive in global health today. Instead of highlighting their advantages or shortcomings, this article builds on Hacking's notion of historical ontology and explores their political, conceptual and material conditions of possibility. Drawing on research on the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use in Developing Countries, one of the largest international efforts to address the non-communicable disease epidemic in the global South, the article starts by introducing the notion of epidemiological reason – a thought style associated with modern epidemiology that undergirds the metrics permeating the global health field and which is made of a multiplicity of elements, from the ethical imperative to save lives to the social-scientific technique of the survey and the concept of global population. The article then goes on to explore the genealogy of this thought style, arguing that three epistemological ruptures have been critical to its development: the reconfiguration of power articulated around a biopolitics of population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the twentieth-century shift in medical thought marked by the emergence of surveillance medicine and the idea of lifestyle; and the re-organisation of world health informed by globalisation theories at the start of the twenty-first century.

Forthcoming edited collection with contributions from: 1. Clare Herrick: Geographies of global ... more Forthcoming edited collection with contributions from:

1. Clare Herrick: Geographies of global health.
2. David Reubi (QMUL): Epidemiological Rule – Epidemiologists, Numbers and the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Control in the Global South
3. Nele Jensen (QMUL): A geneaology of evidence at the WHO
4. Matthew Sparke (University of Washington): Redlining global health: Targets, enclaves and the limits of investing in life
5. Stephen Taylor (QMUL): After clinical trials: enrolment and abandonment in global health research
6. Emma Laurie (Edinburgh): ‘A politics (t)here too…’: Embodied Politics of health for the global majority
7. Betsey Brada (Princeton): Exemplary or Exceptional? The Production and Dismantling of Global Health in Botswana
8. Paul Jackson (Dartmouth): The AIDS Research Model: How political advocacy became central to biomedical funding and research
9. Susan Craddock (University of Minnesota): Making Ties through Making Drugs: Partnerships for tuberculosis drug and vaccine development
10. Gerry Kearns (Maynooth) : Global AIDS and international responsibility
11. Stephen Hinchliffe (Exeter): More than one world, more than one health: re-configuring inter-species health
12. Jamie Lorimer (Oxford): Worms North and South: A probiotic biopolitics
13. Uli Beisel (Beyreuth University): Towards an affirmative biopolitics of malaria: human-mosquito interactions and the development of immunity and resistance
14. Sarah Atkinson (Durham): Mixing and fixing: managing and imagining the body in a global world
15. Clare Herrick (King’s College London): The (non)charisma of non-communicable disease
16. Tim Brown (QMUL): Healthy interventions: tracing the place of green space in an international movement for health.
17. Jane Battersby (UCT): Eat your greens. Buy some chips: Contesting articulations of food and food security in children’s lives.

Papers by David Reubi

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2020

There is a growing anthropological literature analyzing the place that epidemiological surveillan... more There is a growing anthropological literature analyzing the place that epidemiological surveillance occupies in contemporary global health. In this article, I build on this literature and take it into new directions by exploring what I call the epidemiological imaginaries of the social. Drawing on science and technology studies, I suggest that epidemiologists help make up the world, articulating complex and normatively loaded visions of social life that both enable and constrain action. More specifically, I argue that epidemiologists tell stories about the type of societies and people that compose the world and that these stories often shape global health policies and programs in powerful ways. To substantiate this argument, I examine epidemiologists' efforts to map smoking in postcolonial Africa, documenting how they have imagined smokers and smoking through the lense of modernization theory and showing how these imaginaries have shaped tobacco control policies in the region up to this day. [epidemiological surveillance, global health metrics, social imaginary, smoking, postcolonial Africa]

BioSocieties, 2018

Metrics have become all pervasive in global health today. Instead of highlighting their advantage... more Metrics have become all pervasive in global health today. Instead of highlighting their advantages or shortcomings, this article builds on Hacking's notion of historical ontology and explores their political, conceptual and material conditions of possibility. Drawing on research on the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use in Developing Countries, one of the largest international efforts to address the non-communicable disease epidemic in the global South, the article starts by introducing the notion of epidemiological reason-a thought style associated with modern epidemiology that undergirds the metrics permeating the global health field and which is made of a multiplicity of elements, from the ethical imperative to save lives to the social-scientific technique of the survey and the concept of global population. The article then goes on to explore the genealogy of this thought style, arguing that three epistemological ruptures have been critical to its development: the reconfiguration of power articulated around a biopolitics of population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the twentieth-century shift in medical thought marked by the emergence of surveillance medicine and the idea of lifestyle; and the re-organisation of world health informed by globalisation theories at the start of the twenty-first century.

There has been concern about the recent private turn and re-emergence of philanthropies in world ... more There has been concern about the recent private turn and re-emergence of philanthropies in world health, with many worrying about these philanthropies’ perceived lack of transparency and accountability. In contrast, I argue that while the private turn might have led to a decline in democratic or public accountability, it did not bring an end to all forms of accountability. Specifically, I suggest philanthropists’ involvement in global health has led to the spread of another, new form of accountability: epidemiological accountability. The latter is a combination of two regimes of expertise and practices hitherto kept separate: audit and epidemiology. To substantiate this argument, I draw on my research on the Bloomberg Initiative – a global effort to reduce tobacco use spearheaded by the Bloomberg and Gates foundations.

In the last 20 years, global health experts have recognized the importance and encouraged the ado... more In the last 20 years, global health experts have recognized the importance and encouraged the adoption of sin taxes in the fight against non-communicable diseases in the Global South. These sin taxes are typical of the micro-technologies that have proliferated in the fields of development and humanitarian aid in the past two decades, what Stephen Collier, Peter Redfield, and their colleagues have called “little development devices” and “humanitarian goods” (Collier et al., 2017; Cross, 2013; Redfield, 2012). In this essay, I shed some light on the complex genealogies of these micro-technologies by unpacking some of the political theories, scientific concepts, and ethical norms that make up sin taxes. I suggest that sin taxes are built around a particular subject – the rational actor seeking to maximize their welfare in line with their own preferences – whose origins can be traced back to the Chicago School’s microeconomic tradition and its concern with rational choice theory. In doing so, I draw on Madeleine Akrich’s (1992) concept of “de-scription” and her claim that one can find inscribed in a technical device many of the assumptions, aspirations, and values of those who designed it. In my de-scription of sin taxes, I examine the work of a small network of economists led by University of Chicago professor Gary Becker that was instrumental in transforming sin taxes into an accepted global health strategy. In particular, I focus on this network’s research on tobacco taxation, which was the first type of sin tax to gain acceptance in the global health field and later served as a model for excises on alcohol and sugar. I begin by showing how this research grew out of Chicago’s microeconomic tradition and Becker’s work in particular before examining how it radically transformed international tobacco control and the model of the smoker that underpins it. I conclude by reflecting on what this story can teach us about the wider history of the recent proliferation of micro-technologies in the fields of development and humanitarian aid.

This article explores the spatio-temporal logics at work in global health. Influenced by ideas of... more This article explores the spatio-temporal logics at work in global health. Influenced by ideas of time–space compression, the global health literature argues that the world is characterised by a convergence of disease patterns and biomedical knowledge. While not denying the influence of these temporalities and spatialities of globalisation within the global health and chronic disease field, the article argues that they sit alongside other, often-conflicting notions of time and space. To do so, it explores the spatio-temporal logics that underpin a highly influential epidemiological model of the smoking epidemic. Unlike the temporalities and spatialities of sameness described in much of the global health literature, the article shows that this model is articulated around temporalities and spatialities of difference. This is not the difference celebrated by postmoderns, but the difference of modernisation theorists built around nations, sequential stages and progress. Indeed, the model, in stark contrast to the ‘one world, one time, one health’ globalisation mantra, divides the world into nation–states and orders them along epidemiological, geographical and development lines.

This article explores the internationalisation of tobacco control as a case study in the history ... more This article explores the internationalisation of tobacco control as a case study in the history of international health regulation. Contrary to the existing literature on the topic, it argues that the history of international anti-smoking efforts is longer and richer than the making of the World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in the early twenty-first century. It thereby echoes the point made by other scholars about the importance of history when making sense of contemporary global health. Specifically, the article shows how the internationalisation of tobacco control started in the 1950s through informal contacts between scientists working on cancer research and how these initial interactions were followed by a growing number of more formal initiatives, from the World Conferences on Tobacco or Health to the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use. Rather than arranging these efforts in a linear narrative of progress culminating with the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, we take anthropological claims about global health's uneven terrain seriously and portray a history of international tobacco control marked by ruptures and discontinuities. Specifically, we identify three successive periods, with each of them characterised by specific understandings of international action, tobacco control expertise, advocacy networks and funding strategies.

This article tells a different but equally important story about neoliberalism and global health ... more This article tells a different but equally important story about neoliberalism and global health than the narrative on structural adjustment policies usually found in the literature. Rather than focus on macroeconomic structural adjustment policies, this story draws our attention to microeconomic taxation policies on tobacco, alcohol and sugar now widely recognised as the best strategy to control the global NCD epidemic. Structural adjustment policies are the product of the shift from statist to market-based development models, which was brought about by neoliberal thinkers like Peter Blau and Deepak Lal. In contrast, taxation policies are the result of a different epistemological rupture in international development: the move from economies and physical capital to people and human capital, advocated by Gary Becker and others. This move was part of a wider change, which saw Chicago School economists, under the influence of rational choice theory, redefine the object of their discipline, from the study of markets to individual choices. It was this concern with people and their choices that made it possible for Becker and others to identify the importance of price for the demand for tobacco, alcohol and sugar. The same concern also made it easier for them to recognise that there were inefficiencies in the tobacco, alcohol and sugar markets that required government intervention. This story, I suggest, shows that structural adjustment policies and pro-market ideology do not exhaust the relationship between neoliberalism and global health and should stop dictating how we, as political and social scientists, conceive it.

In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of polit... more In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these shifts have become an object of critical social scientific enquiry. These shifts mark the starting point for this special issue on ‘The Politics of NCDs in the Global South’ and act as the basis for new, critical interventions in how we understand NCDs. In this paper, we aim not only to introduce and contextualise the six contributions that form this special issue, but also to identify and explore three themes – problematisation, care and culture – that index the main areas of analytical and empirical concern that have motivated analyses of NCDs in the global South and are central to critical engagement with their political contours.

This article explores the spatio-temporal logics at work in global health. Influenced by ideas of... more This article explores the spatio-temporal logics at work in global health. Influenced by ideas of time–space compression, the global health literature argues that the world is characterised by a convergence of disease patterns and biomedical knowledge. While not denying the influence of these temporalities and spatialities of globalisation within the global health and chronic disease field, the article argues that they sit alongside other,often-conflicting notions of time and space. To do so,it explores the spatio-temporal logics that underpin a highly influential epidemiological model of the smoking epidemic. Unlike the temporalities and spatialities of sameness described in much of the global health literature, the article shows that this model is articulated around temporalities and spatialities of difference. This is not the difference celebrated by postmoderns, but the difference of modernisation theorists built around nations, sequential stages and progress. Indeed, the model, in stark contrast to the ‘one world, one time,one health’ globalisation mantra, divides the world into nation–states and orders them along epidemiological, geographical and development lines.

"This article addresses the increasing influence of economic rationalities in global health over ... more "This article addresses the increasing influence of economic rationalities in global health over the past 30 years by examining the genealogy of one economic strategy – taxation – that has become central to international anti-smoking initiatives in the global South. It argues that this genealogy sits uncomfortably with the usual story about economics and global health, which reduces the economisation of international health to neoliberal structural adjustment policies aimed at stabilisation, liberalisation and privatisation and laments their detrimental effect on health. While not disputing these policies’ importance and damaging impact, the genealogy of tobacco taxes outlined in this article shows that the economisation of global health is not only about neoliberal structural adjustment policies but also about sin taxes, market failures and health economics. By stressing how changes in health like the global South’s epidemiological transition can impact on economics and how beneficial taxation can be for health, it also shows that the relation between economics and health is not always unidirectional and detrimental to the latter. In doing so, the article contributes to the critique of the often mechanical use of neo-liberalism to explicate change and calls for other stories about the economisation of global health to be told."

"The way in which the scientific and medical use of the human body is problematised and governed ... more "The way in which the scientific and medical use of the human body is problematised and governed in the United Kingdom was radically reconfigured over the last 30 years, changing from a logic of rule articulated around ‘supply’ and ‘solidarity’ to one construed around ‘ethics’. Drawing on the work of Ludwik Fleck and others, this article argues that one of the reasons for this reconfiguration was the existence and influence of a network of philosophers, doctors and lawyers who sought, from the 1960s onwards, to re-moralise medicine: the bioethical thought collective. The article first describes the collective’s membership and organisation, focusing in particular on the form of the interdisciplinary expert committee. It also describes some of the knowledge and practices that make up the community’s thought style, such as its moral concern about modern medicine and the notions of respect for persons and informed consent. The article then shows how these organisational forms, knowledge and practices that characterise the collective have shaped the government of human tissue research over the last 15 years. By highlighting the important role played by expert networks and knowledge, the article makes an original contribution to the sociology of the ethical government of biomedical science."

"This article addresses the proliferation of human rights in international public health over the... more "This article addresses the proliferation of human rights in international public health over the last 20 years by examining recent attempts at framing the global smoking epidemic as a human rights problem. Rather than advocating in favour or against human rights-based approaches, the article purports to understand
how and why such approaches are being articulated and disseminated. First, it argues that the representation of the global smoking epidemic as a human rights issue has been the product of a small, international network of public health experts and lawyers: the human rights and tobacco control collective or community (HTC). The article describes in particular the HTC’s membership,
its style of thinking and its efforts to articulate and disseminate human rights based approaches to tobacco control. Second, the article argues that the aim of the HTC when framing tobacco control as a human rights issue was not to generate public attention for and the political will to tackle the global smoking
epidemic, as the literature on framing and human rights presupposes. Instead, as the article shows, the HTC framed tobacco control as a human rights problem to tap into the powerful, judicial monitoring and enforceability mechanisms that
make up international human rights."

Forthcoming edited collection with contributions from: 1. Clare Herrick: Geographies of global ... more Forthcoming edited collection with contributions from:

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2020

BioSocieties, 2018

Metrics have become all pervasive in global health today. Instead of highlighting their advantage... more Metrics have become all pervasive in global health today. Instead of highlighting their advantages or shortcomings, this article builds on Hacking's notion of historical ontology and explores their political, conceptual and material conditions of possibility. Drawing on research on the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use in Developing Countries, one of the largest international efforts to address the non-communicable disease epidemic in the global South, the article starts by introducing the notion of epidemiological reason-a thought style associated with modern epidemiology that undergirds the metrics permeating the global health field and which is made of a multiplicity of elements, from the ethical imperative to save lives to the social-scientific technique of the survey and the concept of global population. The article then goes on to explore the genealogy of this thought style, arguing that three epistemological ruptures have been critical to its development: the reconfiguration of power articulated around a biopolitics of population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the twentieth-century shift in medical thought marked by the emergence of surveillance medicine and the idea of lifestyle; and the re-organisation of world health informed by globalisation theories at the start of the twenty-first century.

This article explores the spatio-temporal logics at work in global health. Influenced by ideas of... more This article explores the spatio-temporal logics at work in global health. Influenced by ideas of time–space compression, the global health literature argues that the world is characterised by a convergence of disease patterns and biomedical knowledge. While not denying the influence of these temporalities and spatialities of globalisation within the global health and chronic disease field, the article argues that they sit alongside other,often-conflicting notions of time and space. To do so,it explores the spatio-temporal logics that underpin a highly influential epidemiological model of the smoking epidemic. Unlike the temporalities and spatialities of sameness described in much of the global health literature, the article shows that this model is articulated around temporalities and spatialities of difference. This is not the difference celebrated by postmoderns, but the difference of modernisation theorists built around nations, sequential stages and progress. Indeed, the model, in stark contrast to the ‘one world, one time,one health’ globalisation mantra, divides the world into nation–states and orders them along epidemiological, geographical and development lines.

""This article, which discusses the importance of frames and framing when examining the developme... more ""This article, which discusses the importance of frames and framing when examining the development of global public health, was co-authored with Colin McInnes, Simon Rushton, Anne Roemer-Mahler, Kelley Lee, Owain Williams, Marie Woodling and Adam Kamradt-Scott."

"This article examines how a fundamental element of the British bioethical assemblage – the liter... more "This article examines how a fundamental element of the British bioethical assemblage – the literature on informed consent published between 1980 and 2000, a period when bioethics became a powerful force in the UK – has influenced contemporary understandings of the research subject. Drawing on Foucault, the article argues that this corpus of texts has created a sphere of possibilities in which research subjects can imagine themselves as human beings who reflect and decide whether they want to participate in medical experimentation. In particular, it shows how the narratives found in these texts portray relationships between researchers and their human subjects as ‘paternalistic’, and calls for their replacement by new, more ethical relationships characterized by both ‘dialogue’ and ‘respect’ and articulated around subjects who can ‘think and take decisions’. It also discusses the different strategies – using patient information sheets, a list of possible questions and invitations to take time to reflect – which the bioethical literature has developed in order to realise these new, ethical relationships. As the article suggests, these narratives and strategies provide researchers and research subjects with models and examples of how to interact with each other that are very different from the ones that prevailed before the emergence of bioethics."

"This article is a critque of a recent article by Ted Schrecker et al. entitled "Advancing Health... more "This article is a critque of a recent article by Ted Schrecker et al. entitled "Advancing Health Equity in the Global Market Place: How Human Rights Can Help". It argues that, contrary to what Schrecker and other global health activists seem to think, the international human rights framework might not help halt the detrimental consequences of what Schrecker calls market fundamentalism."

The British Journal of Sociology, Jan 1, 2011

The British Journal of Sociology, Jan 1, 2009