Moving risk: Tuberculosis, migration and the scope of public health at the United States-Mexico border

This dissertation uses the politics of scale to analyze how public health bureaucracies engage migrants through different scopes, or "ways of seeing," tuberculosis---through the lenses of population, community or globalization. Global discourses of tuberculosis portray an interconnected world where "disease knows no borders," and simultaneously cast migrants as vectors of disease. Epidemiology in the United States categorizes the "foreign-born" as a major at-risk population but in so doing can also divorce individuals from their lived social context and open the door for stigmatization and xenophobia. What I call a community scope of tuberculosis centers on patients' social contexts and networks. It highlights the various socioeconomic and historical factors contributing to the disease, such as the stress of migration itself. Many public health employees depend on their familiarity with patients' social context to deliver daily tuberculosis treatment, in contrast to administrative protocols based on epidemiology and risk analysis---a population scope. My research engages how these different "ways of seeing" interact or conflict, how they are deployed across different levels of public health bureaucracies on both sides of the US/Mexico border, and how these deployments affect policy, binational organizing, and individual treatment.