Synopses & Reviews
Using ethnographic evidence from around the globe, this volume's contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and the consequences of using metrics as primary tools for global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates in Southeastern Africa to highlight the assumptions built into equations, outlining the links between political goals and metrics data in Nigeria and Alaska, or discussing how health outcomes are tied to calculating a program's monetary worth in Haiti, the contributors question the ability of metrics to offer universal standards for solving global health problems. While using metrics can improve health and open up new kinds of political and fiscal opportunities, they also have the ability to obstruct the treatment of specific cases and discount what people know about their own lives.
Metrics captures a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of using metrics—the ideal implementation of which remains elusive and problematic.
Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Susan Erikson, Molly Hales, Pierre Minn, Adeola Oni-Orisan, Carolyn Smith-Morris, Marlee Tichenor, Lily Walkover, Claire L. Wendland
Review
"A stunning benchmark volume, in measured tones of 'applause and caution,' about the statistical methods that increasingly govern and provide investment opportunities for health interventions, poverty reduction, and much else in the postcolonial world. These new biopolitical economies displace national decision making and often their own humanitarian goals, using tropes of 'suffering individuals' as 'residuals' as symbolic capital to be reinvested and to give numbers affective credibility. But such stories can also expose the fabrications and distortions that the drive for statistical certainty produces, and explain why so many well-intentioned 'evidence based' interventions fail. Lucidly explaining global health financialization, the volume calls for alternative metrics, complementary methods, and less reliance on abstracted indices and proxies."
Review
“Timely, incisive, and of immense importance, Metrics is the first volume to bring together ethnographic perspectives to critically assess the increasingly outsized role that audit cultures now play in determining the form, content, and politics of global health research and practice. Adding new specificity to the expanding literature on critical studies of global health,
Metrics will resonate well beyond the field of anthropology, impacting history, sociology, policy, ethics, epidemiology, and economics."
Synopsis
The contributors to Metrics use ethnographic evidence from around the globe to evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and the consequences of applying metrics to global health. Now the standard in measuring global health program success, metrics has far implications that extend beyond patients to the political and financial realms.
Synopsis
This volume's contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and consequences of using quantitative metrics in global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates, the relationships between political goals and metrics data, or the links between health outcomes and a program's fiscal support, the contributors question the ability of metrics to solve global health problems. They capture a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of different metrics even as they remain elusive and problematic.
Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Susan Erikson, Molly Hales, Pierre Minn, Adeola Oni-Orisan, Carolyn Smith-Morris, Marlee Tichenor, Lily Walkover, Claire L. Wendland"
About the Author
Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of
Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina and the coeditor of
Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective, both also published by Duke University Press.