| If there is no question that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has touched nearly every aspect of society in Botswana, there can be little doubt that, likewise, the treatment programs implemented to address the epidemic have also far exceeded the boundaries of the clinic. Over the past decade, as Botswana became a celebrated model in southern Africa and beyond for managing its epidemic, American private foundations and universities, attracted by the epidemic's magnitude and by the country's success in providing treatment, have formed a number of "public-private partnerships" to support the country's treatment program. Like the epidemic itself, the treatment program and the partnerships that support it have reached far beyond the boundaries of countries, such as Botswana, that bear the highest burden of the disease, to transform the nature of "global health" interventions and the transnational regimes of expertise that implement them. Like the epidemic, too, the treatment program and the partnerships that support it have set in motion more subtle transformations, both intended and unintended, that reach far beyond the clinic walls.;The dissertation offers an empirical investigation of the institutions, practices, and imaginaries glossed as "global health" in southeastern Botswana, illuminating the interrelation between treatment provision, knowledge production, subjectivity, expertise, value, and temporality. I demonstrate how bodily interventions serve as sites for the refashioning of subjects and the reordering of semiotic modalities, forming the grounds for new forms of expertise and value and new ways of producing futures. While "global health" has become a standard feature of American medical school curricula and international development agendas, I show how its seeming stability as a concept and a field of practice emerges as shifting relations amongst states, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and philanthropists are worked out at the level of individual bodies. Botswana's treatment program is an ideal site to examine how biopolitical orders become intimately bound to particular forms of signification, value, and expertise. |
