Eradicating Blindness

This book describes community ophthalmology professionals in South Asia who demonstrate social entrepreneurship in global health to help the rural poor. Their innovations contested economic and scientific norms, and spread from India and Nepal outwards to other countries in Africa and Asia, as well as the United States, Australia, and Finland. This feminist postcolonial global ethnography illustrates how these innovations have resulted in dual socio-technical systems to solve the problem of avoidable blindness. Policymakers and activists might use this example of how to avoid Schumacher's critique of low labor, large scale and implement Gandhi's philosophy of good for all.

The first book to study the development of innovative ophthalmological science, and technology and social entrepreneurship in South Asia, and its circulation throughout the Global South Uses multi-sited, empirical data from four eye hospitals (in India, Nepal, Kenya and Mexico) Offers a feminist postcolonial multi-level perspective analysis by pairing an explicit attention to the imposition of power through modes of science and technology circulation with new insights into the multi-level perspective on socio-technical system change Advances theoretical understanding of innovation 'from below', science and technology circulation and appropriate technology choice in a global field of scienceophthalmology

Autorentext

Logan D. A. Williams is the principal of Logan Williams Consultancy Services, LLC, and an Associate Editor of Science as Culture. Formerly she was an Assistant Professor of History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science in the Lyman Briggs College and the department of Sociology at Michigan State University, USA.

Inhalt
Preface.- Acknowledgments.- List of Tables.- List of Figures.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Origins of an Autonomous Global Network to Eradicate Blindness.- 3. Balancing the Scales: Appropriate Technology and Social Entrepreneurship.- 4. Witnessing Rural Blindness: Standardizing Benchmarks from Eye Camps.- 5. A Lab of Our Own: Technology Diffusion from Incumbent Regime.- 6. The Hard Case Of White Cataracts: Appropriation of Surgical Science.- 7. Training The New Cadre: Translation of Interlocking Innovations.- 8. Evidence-Based Medicine: Contesting the Phaco-Regime.- 9. Conclusion: Innovation from Below.- 10. Appendix A: The Extended Case Method and Global Ethnography.- 11 Appendix B: The Robin Hood Model.- Organizational Charts for Four Community Ophthalmology Units.- Glossary of Common Ophthalmology Surgical Terms.- Index.