Research

This project investigates the boundaries of consciousness of malaria and its control in the context of planetary health. It explores human and nonhuman elements constituted within the consciousness boundaries of malaria control interventions - their history, shifting terrain, and the techniques and operations of power inherent therein.

Using a combination of genealogical research and critical ethnography in East-Central Uganda, the study establishes linkages between consciousness and population vulnerability, illuminates conditions that foreground malaria policies, and reveals different ways of malaria representation and their cultural logics.

Drawing from an ethnographic understanding of how infants and young children's bodies collapse and break in the face of malaria parasites, Alexander argues for reframing the way disease is conceptualised. Disease, he argues, should be framed not merely as an event that marks parasitic effect on the body, but also as markers of points when the body testifies to the social world about processes of material ruination it has endured for long and can no longer hold alone.

This work highlights how diagnostic practices selectively emphasise some cases of malaria while making others invisible, creating recurring infections that undermine the health of children under five.

We argue that diagnostic failures are not always due to a lack of tools; they are also shaped by weakened health system infrastructures, macro-level power strategies influencing local diagnostic practices, and failures of the tools themselves.

Alexander and colleagues critique Merrill Singer's syndemic theory for not adequately explaining the double condition of syndemic living and routine interventions in which population suffering is sustained.

We recommend that syndemic analysis incorporate ecological crises that define syndemic living and also extend beyond the boundaries of biological and biosocial interactions and synergies to examine what occurs on syndemic surfaces.

This project investigates how African subjects and populations are mentally and socially structured. Analysing through the intersection of social fields, planetary entanglements, and global epistemic frameworks.

Working at the intersections of medical anthropology and medical sociology, Alexander examines the social symbolic order from which African subjects and populations project their identities.

Alexander examined how power operates through policies and practices in abortion care delivery to privilege certain populations while rendering the needs of others invisible.

This project shows that policy and abortion practices are sites where power is enacted, reproduced, resisted, and transformed. Governmentality is imposed, challenged, and appropriated by participants.