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Publications by Tara Johnson
Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2019
This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Prin... more This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, it focuses on the contexts surrounding the point at which the raw data (on which country statistics are generated) are entered into the medical record. This focus sheds light on the hidden, elided, or otherwise unseen aspects of clinical practice that global health stakeholders risk missing when privileging statistical data over direct observation. Direct observation reveals not only how specious data comes to be part of the medical record, but why.
Technology's Stories: Online Journal of Society for the History of Technology , 2015
Tara Dosumu Diener explores the ontology of the hospital, an institution with technological pract... more Tara Dosumu Diener explores the ontology of the hospital, an institution with technological practices that may seem easily identifiable, even exportable to Africa. The historical roots of the institution in Africa, however, suggest alternative ways to understand the practices of medicine and its objects.
Talks by Tara Johnson
History 285: Science, Technology, Medicine and Society
Conference Presentations by Tara Johnson
European Conference on African Studies, May 2015
In September of 2014, the President of Sierra Leone announced a three-day lockdown to ensure the ... more In September of 2014, the President of Sierra Leone announced a three-day lockdown to ensure the success of the “Ose to Ose” Ebola eradication campaign. The goal of this campaign - an inspection of every household in a nation of almost six million people - seemed extraordinary but, as President Koroma claimed: "Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures." However, “extraordinary” large-scale residential health inspections in Sierra Leone began as early as 1897, when British Sanitary Inspector William Prout commissioned a police force for a “house to house visitation of the whole town,” producing wildly inaccurate data from terrified residents. This paper reconstructs a history of health-oriented residential inspections in Freetown, noting the critical shift that took place with the mid-century emergence of the African Health Visitor. This new category of nurse conducted home visits, maintained a register of births, and promoted the health and well-being of mothers and babies on behalf of the state. The paper argues that the success of Ose to Ose campaigns in 2014-15 drew strength from the earlier success of the Health Visitors who overcame the legacy of fear and hiding associated with the visits of Dr. Prout’s Sanitary Policemen.
60th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Nov. 2017
Visitors familiar with hospitals in the Global North will be struck by a visual anachronism upon ... more Visitors familiar with hospitals in the Global North will be struck by a visual anachronism upon entering Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone: nursing students in starched and striped caps; midwifery students in dazzling white aprons; matrons and ward sisters wearing bright red belts clasped by ornate metal buckles. This paper asks what is at stake for whom in this visual memory work. Using historical photographs as key pieces of evidence, it tracks the movements of British and Sierra Leonean nurses within the photographic frame from 1892-1946. Building on 15 months of archival and ethnographic research, it combines anthropological and visual modes of analysis to find clinical ideals expressed in sartorial references to Florence Nightingale with her lamp and a bygone era of nursing attire. These are at great odds with everyday practical training and material exigencies on the maternity ward. This paper argues that clinical standards established in the colonial era are maintained today in part through careful cultivation of a distinctly feminine style of dress and comportment.
International Nursing Ethics Conference, Cork, Ireland
Papers by Tara Johnson
This study is an ethnographic history of nursing, midwifery, and childbirth in Sierra Leone. Comb... more This study is an ethnographic history of nursing, midwifery, and childbirth in Sierra Leone. Combining rigorous attention to a historical longue durée as well as evidence collected via ethnographic immersion, this dissertation's focus is on care, dress, and prestige in a single West African hospital. It was researched and written as a contribution to the history and anthropology of medicine in Africa; it also engages with the literatures on bioethics, nursing, science and technology studies, dress, and visuality. It explores colonial and postcolonial clinical practices, and situates these as knowledge, visuality, and embodied memory. Its focus is the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital (PCMH) founded in Freetown, Sierra Leone by British missionaries in 1892. Nursing and midwifery staff at this hospital practice today amidst crumbling infrastructure. The lack of basic necessities and socioeconomic circumstances often mean that the hospital only receives emergent, destitute cases. All the while its nurses wear 19 th century-era uniforms that suggest complex, color-coded hierarchies. This study asks what is at stake and for whom in this sartorial work. It also asks how the clinical and the historical intersect on the wards. How have the perceptions of maternity nurses informed habits of giving and seeking maternity care in Freetown? The questions emerged during 15 months of historical research and ethnographic fieldwork, mining archives in Britain and Sierra Leone, and interviewing and coming to know childbearing women, nursing students, and hospital staff of all grades at maternity centers throughout Freetown, notably PCMH. There, in particular, six months of intensive participant observation and semi-structured, in-depth interviews enabled much data collection and analysis. The arguments of this dissertation are several: Nursing practice at PCMH iv emerged through decades with maternity care providers contending with varying degrees of scarcity, precarity, and inequality. The context is a sedimented one, requiring a sedimented, visual methodology. The practice of nursing, much like the city of Freetown, was established with British ideals on African soil; they have long been inflected by social and spatial practices. Practices of circulation, mobility, and nursing care have been translated across generations and also transformed. The seemingly anachronistic uniforms of PCMH nurses bear important evidence about intersecting logics revealing much about prestige, hierarchies, fame, humiliation, and implicit violence; consciously and unconsciously, these affective, material, and visual logics signify at multiple registers. v
Technology's Stories, 2015
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines
This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Prin... more This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, it focuses on the contexts surrounding the point at which the raw data (on which country statistics are generated) are entered into the medical record. This focus sheds light on the hidden, elided, or otherwise unseen aspects of clinical practice that global health stakeholders risk missing when privileging statistical data over direct observation. Direct observation reveals not only how specious data comes to be part of the medical record, but why.
Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2019
This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Prin... more This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, it focuses on the contexts surrounding the point at which the raw data (on which country statistics are generated) are entered into the medical record. This focus sheds light on the hidden, elided, or otherwise unseen aspects of clinical practice that global health stakeholders risk missing when privileging statistical data over direct observation. Direct observation reveals not only how specious data comes to be part of the medical record, but why.
Technology's Stories: Online Journal of Society for the History of Technology , 2015
Tara Dosumu Diener explores the ontology of the hospital, an institution with technological pract... more Tara Dosumu Diener explores the ontology of the hospital, an institution with technological practices that may seem easily identifiable, even exportable to Africa. The historical roots of the institution in Africa, however, suggest alternative ways to understand the practices of medicine and its objects.
History 285: Science, Technology, Medicine and Society
European Conference on African Studies, May 2015
In September of 2014, the President of Sierra Leone announced a three-day lockdown to ensure the ... more In September of 2014, the President of Sierra Leone announced a three-day lockdown to ensure the success of the “Ose to Ose” Ebola eradication campaign. The goal of this campaign - an inspection of every household in a nation of almost six million people - seemed extraordinary but, as President Koroma claimed: "Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures." However, “extraordinary” large-scale residential health inspections in Sierra Leone began as early as 1897, when British Sanitary Inspector William Prout commissioned a police force for a “house to house visitation of the whole town,” producing wildly inaccurate data from terrified residents. This paper reconstructs a history of health-oriented residential inspections in Freetown, noting the critical shift that took place with the mid-century emergence of the African Health Visitor. This new category of nurse conducted home visits, maintained a register of births, and promoted the health and well-being of mothers and babies on behalf of the state. The paper argues that the success of Ose to Ose campaigns in 2014-15 drew strength from the earlier success of the Health Visitors who overcame the legacy of fear and hiding associated with the visits of Dr. Prout’s Sanitary Policemen.
60th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Nov. 2017
Visitors familiar with hospitals in the Global North will be struck by a visual anachronism upon ... more Visitors familiar with hospitals in the Global North will be struck by a visual anachronism upon entering Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone: nursing students in starched and striped caps; midwifery students in dazzling white aprons; matrons and ward sisters wearing bright red belts clasped by ornate metal buckles. This paper asks what is at stake for whom in this visual memory work. Using historical photographs as key pieces of evidence, it tracks the movements of British and Sierra Leonean nurses within the photographic frame from 1892-1946. Building on 15 months of archival and ethnographic research, it combines anthropological and visual modes of analysis to find clinical ideals expressed in sartorial references to Florence Nightingale with her lamp and a bygone era of nursing attire. These are at great odds with everyday practical training and material exigencies on the maternity ward. This paper argues that clinical standards established in the colonial era are maintained today in part through careful cultivation of a distinctly feminine style of dress and comportment.
International Nursing Ethics Conference, Cork, Ireland
This study is an ethnographic history of nursing, midwifery, and childbirth in Sierra Leone. Comb... more This study is an ethnographic history of nursing, midwifery, and childbirth in Sierra Leone. Combining rigorous attention to a historical longue durée as well as evidence collected via ethnographic immersion, this dissertation's focus is on care, dress, and prestige in a single West African hospital. It was researched and written as a contribution to the history and anthropology of medicine in Africa; it also engages with the literatures on bioethics, nursing, science and technology studies, dress, and visuality. It explores colonial and postcolonial clinical practices, and situates these as knowledge, visuality, and embodied memory. Its focus is the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital (PCMH) founded in Freetown, Sierra Leone by British missionaries in 1892. Nursing and midwifery staff at this hospital practice today amidst crumbling infrastructure. The lack of basic necessities and socioeconomic circumstances often mean that the hospital only receives emergent, destitute cases. All the while its nurses wear 19 th century-era uniforms that suggest complex, color-coded hierarchies. This study asks what is at stake and for whom in this sartorial work. It also asks how the clinical and the historical intersect on the wards. How have the perceptions of maternity nurses informed habits of giving and seeking maternity care in Freetown? The questions emerged during 15 months of historical research and ethnographic fieldwork, mining archives in Britain and Sierra Leone, and interviewing and coming to know childbearing women, nursing students, and hospital staff of all grades at maternity centers throughout Freetown, notably PCMH. There, in particular, six months of intensive participant observation and semi-structured, in-depth interviews enabled much data collection and analysis. The arguments of this dissertation are several: Nursing practice at PCMH iv emerged through decades with maternity care providers contending with varying degrees of scarcity, precarity, and inequality. The context is a sedimented one, requiring a sedimented, visual methodology. The practice of nursing, much like the city of Freetown, was established with British ideals on African soil; they have long been inflected by social and spatial practices. Practices of circulation, mobility, and nursing care have been translated across generations and also transformed. The seemingly anachronistic uniforms of PCMH nurses bear important evidence about intersecting logics revealing much about prestige, hierarchies, fame, humiliation, and implicit violence; consciously and unconsciously, these affective, material, and visual logics signify at multiple registers. v
Technology's Stories, 2015
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines
This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Prin... more This paper explores the social practices underlying the production of clinical statistics at Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, it focuses on the contexts surrounding the point at which the raw data (on which country statistics are generated) are entered into the medical record. This focus sheds light on the hidden, elided, or otherwise unseen aspects of clinical practice that global health stakeholders risk missing when privileging statistical data over direct observation. Direct observation reveals not only how specious data comes to be part of the medical record, but why.