Fakes, fabrications and falsehoods in global health
Barely a day goes by without us being confronted with a story about something being fake, so much so that many social theorists argue that we are living through an age of the ‘crisis of authenticity’. This research project seeks to understand how uncertainty and ambiguity about the authenticity of products and activities across a vast array of institutions, actors and locations are reconciled in practice. It will also investigate the moral paradoxes associated with such uncertainty.
The Fakes, Fabrication and Falsehoods project is led by Professor Patricia Kingori and aims to explore concerns about fakes in two broad areas:
1. Knowledge production and (mis)information
Who produces ‘real’ knowledge in academic journals and social media? This project will also explore the growth of shadow scholars and essay mills in STEM subjects and what they produce.
2. Access to high quality drugs and medicines
How do frontline healthcare staff in contexts where medicine quality is a concern reconcile these issues?
Interrogating these areas will inform our understanding of what constitutes authenticity, and will demonstrate that people, policies and places regularly oscillate between ideas of ‘real’ and ‘fake’, ‘genuine’ and ‘inauthentic’, at different times and from different positions. More broadly, this research asks what paying attention to the fake can reveal about global health priorities, systems and infrastructures.
This research will bring together ideas, theories and approaches from various disciplines (including Sociology, Ethics, Science and Technology Studies and History) to further strengthen our understanding of areas of ambiguity, which are simultaneously considered real and fake; the spectrum of possibilities between these two positions will be explored.
This project involves an inter-disciplinary team of researchers and students, working across multiple global health institutions and geographic locations, including NGOs and global health academic and research institutions in Europe, Africa and South East Asia.
This research is funded by a grant from Wellcome (209830/Z/17/Z).
project news
Fakery in Africa, a special edition of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, guest edited by Patricia Kingori, asks what can be learnt from examining what is considered fake in African spaces, and who gets to decide?
Kate Enright has been interviewed about her research into the ethics of medicine quality for the September 2021 issue of the Medicines We Can Trust newsletter.
team member blog
In her blog, Kate Enright explores the ethical implications of concerns about the quality and authenticity of medical products.