Salla Sariola

Blinding Authority Randomized Clinical Trials and the Production of Global Scientific Knowledge in Contemporary Sri Lanka

In this article, the authors present an ethnography of biomedical knowledge production and science collaboration when they take place in developing country contexts. The authors focus on the arrival of international clinical trials to Sri Lanka and provide analysis of what was described as one of the first multisited trials in the country, a pharmaceutical company sponsored, phase 2, randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled trial carried out between 2009 and 2010. Using interviews with those who conducted the trial and six months of participant observation at the trial hospital, the authors describe the work that goes on to perform trials according to international standards. The article describes what happens when a randomized controlled trial encounters existing epistemic virtues and documents the impacts on ideas of authority, expertise and doctor–patient relationships found in Sri Lankan medicine.

Performing global HIV prevention: Incentives, identities and inequality amongst sex workers in Chennai

Sex workers in India are central to HIV prevention programmes, yet the relationships of sex workers with those who conduct HIV prevention have not been studied. In this article I describe and analyse the relationships between four sets of very different social actors: global funding bodies; the Indian government; non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and; sex workers who are involved in HIV prevention in Chennai, India. Using ethnographic data derived from fieldwork conducted in 2004–5, I show that HIV prevention is a performance, rhetoric and a resource available to sex workers as well as to the NGOs. HIV prevention programmes create opportunities for sex workers for social mobilisation and offer them ways of subverting stigma, but these programmes are insufficient because they produce and reproduce existing power hierarchies. Thus when analysing inequality in sex workers’ lives, the influences of local power asymmetries as well as the global dimensions of international HIV prevention policies need to be considered.

Book Review: Sophie Day, On the Game: Women and Sex Work. London: Pluto Press, 2006

zontal, democratic logic of the networked movements vies with the undemocratic logic of command-centred institutions. Chapter 8 demonstrates the book’s central argument of the intersection of political ideals, networked organizations, and new technologies by focusing on digital media and computer activism. Juris characterizes initiatives such as Indymedia as examples of ‘informational utopics’ (pp. 281–4), which have translated democratic political ideals into their ‘technological architectures’ (p. 269) and have thereby prefigured an alternative model for the information society. In the conclusion, Juris seeks to connect this prefigurative quality of the relatively unstable radical networks with the instrumental focus of institutional forces. This displays how his highly reflexive practice has changed his political perspective. Like Williams, he seems to argue for an engagement with the state to achieve reforms. But not seeking merely to control the market, he is still aiming for radical social transformation.