MeST seminar: An Absent Infrastructure: Doing Microbiology in a Collapsed Place

Speaker: Anthony Rizk (Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID)

ABSTRACT: In 1948, at the dawn of the Lebanese republic, physicians in Lebanon imagined a public healthcare system designed around a strong governmental health authority. Today, the government outsources its disease surveillance to a patchwork of private scientific institutions, having been unable to maintain its Central Public Health Laboratory (CPHL). In this talk, I will draw on my ethnographic engagement with microbiology laboratories in Lebanon to explore the significance of this key public institution as an "absent infrastructure," one that enables certain scientific practices, and forecloses others.

Anthony Rizk is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), Switzerland. His dissertation explores the collapse of healthcare, and its reorganisation, amid Lebanon's ongoing financial crisis.