Background
In early 2025, the Trump Administration announced a freeze on foreign aid for global health and other programs. Shortly after, news organizations began to report on immediate disruption to HIV treatment, clinical trials, and other global health activities supported by global health funding from the US government.
Your Assignment
Write a brief proposal to study the impacts of these policy decisions on the delivery of healthcare and/or culture of biomedicine in one setting affected by funding freezes and other programmatic changes. Describe the background for your work, your specific research question, and how you will conduct your work. Your proposal should clearly identify the gaps in knowledge that you are seeking to address through your research and the specific contributions you hope to make as an anthropology student. Your essay should not present or speculate on findings. You should demonstrate basic familiarity (not graduate level mastery) with the anthropological methods that we have discussed in class and draw on the readings, lectures, and discussion on the culture of biomedicine.
Paper Expectations:
- Course papers should demonstrate an understanding of course themes, frameworks, and basic methods employed by anthropologists.
- Analyses, arguments, and claims should be grounded in evidence. I expect you to utilize various forms of evidence, including course reading, to support your argument. Avoid speculation or generalities.
- Your proposal should include a clear research question that is developed throughout the paper.
- Your paper should include a clear, detailed description of your methods. I encourage you to reread the methods sections from other papers and books from the course.
- I encourage you to conduct some basic background research on the proposed setting of your work. For example, you might find programmatic documents or news reports of a facility providing antiretrivoral therapy. I do not expect you to understand the clinical, public health, or community context deeply or display expertise in medicine or epidemiology to complete this exercise.
- This is not an analysis of the political economy of aid, US foreign policy, global health policy, or global health institutions. You may provide background on these policy decisions in your proposal; however, you should focus your proposal on the impacts of these decisions on the provision of care and/or services in one country, community, or healthcare setting.
- Final essays will be 1500-2000 words. Longer essays are permitted; however, this is intended as a brief proposal.
Resources:
https://www.nytimes.com/article/us-foreign-aid-freeze-explained.htmlLinks to an external site.