For web: Join the Anthropology Department for a lecture series with Dr. Claire Wendland. Wendland will host “Ambivalent Technologies” on March 27 from 3:30 P.M. – 4:30 P.M. in McDonel Hall C103.

Zoom option: https://msu.zoom.us/j/99146869800 Passcode: ANP@MSU

Policy makers forty years ago embraced “appropriate technologies,” affordable devices that could substitute for “gold standard” options in poorer places. In subsequent years, the idea has been modified, argued over, denounced, and widely put into practice.

Drawing on fieldwork on maternal health care in Malawi, in this talk Wendland makes four arguments about healing technologies more generally: they displace responsibility; they mark their users; they heal and harm; they can reflect divergent interests.

Dr. Wendland is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Professor in Obstetrics & Gynecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of A Heart for the Work: Journeys through an African Medical School, the first ethnography of a medical school in the global South, and Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles. She is a proud Michigan State University graduate.