Posts By: alastair38

The Biopolitics of the African Smoking Epidemic

This research project examines recent international efforts to address the growing non-communicable disease (NCD) burden in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, it explores global health initiatives to control the smoking epidemic on the subcontinent funded by charities like the American Cancer Society,... View Article

Bioethics, Modernity and Subjectivity

This research project examines how the emergence and globalisation of new languages of virtue like human rights and bioethics have reshaped the government of health and biomedicine. Specifically, it analyses the articulation of biomedical research ethics in the UK and... View Article

Modernisation, Smoking and Chronic Disease:

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... View Article

Constructing Tobacco Control as a Human Rights Issue:

This chapter 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... View Article

Global Assemblages of Virtue and Vitality:

In this three-part introduction to Assembling Health Rights in Global Perspectives, we set the scene for the studies of health rights assemblages carried out in the essays published in this edited collection. In the first part, we sketch a possible... View Article

Re-Moralising Medicine:

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’... View Article

Making a Human Right to Tobacco Control:

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... View Article

Framing Global Health:

This article discusses the importance of frames and framing when examining the articulation and development of global public health policies and initiatives. View Article

The Human Capacity to Reflect and Decide:

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... View Article

The Promise of Human Rights for Global Health:

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... View Article

The Will to Modernize:

This article is a contribution to the sociological and anthropological literature on the recent globalization of Western biomedical research ethics and bioethics. Focusing on Singapore, the article identifies and traces the genealogy of the concepts, expertise, and techniques that made... View Article

Blood donors, development and modernisation:

This article examines the governmental apparatus organised around Singapore’s Blood Transfusion Service (SBTS) and the knowledge, experts and techniques associated with transfusion medicine. I term this apparatus, which was in place in the Singapore from its first steps towards political... View Article

Assembling Health Rights in Global Perspective:

  During the last 20 years there have been an increasing number of initiatives and efforts – for instance in relation to HIV/AIDS – which draw on the language, institutions and procedures of human rights in the field of global... View Article