Mastering Infections: An ethnography of traveling capacity building on infection prevention and control (IPC) in Guinea and Ivory Coast

My research scrutinizes the capacity building activities on Infection, Prevention and Control (IPC) embedded in a partnership between the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany and two state hospitals in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea. I make use of the concept of traveling models to underpin the journey that links the Germany’s Public Health Institute and the hospitals in West Africa. I move away from the traditional approach undertaken by literature on traveling models to argue that an IPC model can be better understood as a complex network composed of a range of actors encompassing patients, global health experts, germs and health care workers which are linked by different infectious trajectories. I focus on some of these trajectories to unravel how infections are studied, lived and experienced in the hospital space where the global health discourse on infection prevention and control is expected to land and to be implemented. I propose a multi-sited, multispecies ethnography to locate these more-than-human trajectories that (re)create the hospital space and are at the same time part of the partnership strategies.

Funding: This project is co-funded by Global Health Protection Program (GHPP), Center for International Health Protection (ZIG) at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).