Project: "A journey to master infections: an ethnography about capacity building on infection prevention and control (IPC) travelling to Guinea and Ivory Coast"

I set out to make use of the concept of traveling models to make an anthropological analysis of a project led by the Robert Koch Institute to build infection prevention and control (IPC) capacities in hospitals in Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire. My interest is to ethnographically reconstruct the model’s biography and its travel to 1) track its places of origin and production, 2) the two-way pathways and practices that make possible the journey to both countries and 3) the social trajectories that interact with the model’s blueprint once it lands on each context. I propose a multi-sited ethnography to localize the possible changes and appropriations as well as the pressures imposed to the model by the context. The ethnography will also situate relations with non-human actors, in particular germs, to underline the human-microbial relations that also account for the conceptualization, operationalization and reception of the model. Advancing in this way the travelling models’ concept will draw attention to the social logics behind IPC capacity building projects. It will thus help to shed more light on the underlying drivers of global health partnerships based on prevention and control established between German public health authorities and their counterparts in West African countries.

Funding: Global Health Protection Program (GHPP), Center for International Health Protection (ZIG) at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).