The Archipelago of Care: Connected Isolation in the Pan-African e-Network

• In Event: The Politics of Science and Technology in International Development 2

Abstract

In September 2004, former president of India Abdul Kalam proposed to connect Africa with India through a network aimed at providing healthcare services. Five years later, the Pan-African e-Network (PAN) was launched. PAN is digital health network connecting doctors and patients across the African continent with tertiary care hospitals in India. Involving a massive network infrastructure, this South-South development project connects hospitals in over thirty countries. Put simply, PAN provides an integrated solution aimed at caring for patients, at a distance. To do so, it assembles a large pool of medical expertise, seeking to reconfigure the global distribution of care. Drawing upon ethnographic research, this paper examines how PAN contributes to the emergence of clinical spaces. It documents the crafting of global yet enclosed, “interior” spaces, in which patients become the object of remote intervention. The paper shows how, from its morphology to its everyday operations, PAN challenges a common “network aesthetic” – the network as a metaphor for seamless circulation. PAN does not so much compress space as it gives it form, which implies an arrangement of elements, an ordering, or mediation of one’s relation to the world: its connectivity is inseparable from technical and political processes of insulation. Ultimately, this paper explores the affordances to which PAN lays claim, and hw they articulate portability and situatedness, circulation and containment, imagined presence and intractable remoteness.

Author

• Vincent Duclos, Drexel University Center for Science, Technology & Society