Crane ’93 Writes Book on Global Health Science and AIDS in Africa

In her new book Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, Expertise, and the Rise of American Global Health Science (Cornell University Press), Johanna Tayloe Crane ’93 considers the past exclusion of African countries from advancements in HIV medicine and shows how the region has transformed into a center for international research and global health programs.

After conducting research in the United States and Uganda over the past 10 years, Crane traces the flow of knowledge and money between laboratories and conference rooms in America and sub-Saharan HIV clinics. Her findings reveal how global health science has paradoxically benefited from and even created the very inequalities it has attempted to redress.

Scrambling for Africa aims to provide a critical geography of expertise that challenges the practices and universal acceptance of “Western” AIDS science. The author questions who global health science is for, who really benefits, and how.

Crane is an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington-Bothell.