Svea Closser

My research centers on global health interventions in South Asia, and the global political, economic, and cultural environments that affect their shape and trajectory. Global public health has made impressive strides in the last fifty years. But even now one in thirteen children born worldwide die before they turn five, the vast majority from preventable and treatable disease. My research is driven by the question: What are the reasons for the lackluster results of many global health interventions?

These interests were sparked during a year-long study abroad program in Nepal during college, where my experiences in several independent study projects left me acutely aware that development programs which look excellent on paper may be ineffective at best in practice. After college, I went to Pakistan on a Fulbright Student Grant to study the relationships between ethnomedical practitioners (often called “traditional healers”) and Primary Health Care providers in Pakistan. I interviewed healers from a number of medical traditions, including doctors, and conducted interviews to determine which practitioners people visited when they or their children got sick, and why. I concluded that in some areas, ethnomedical practitioners could be great assets in providing basic yet crucial health interventions. However, barriers to effectively working with these healers existed in the culture of health institutions.

In 2006-2007, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Science Foundation, I returned to Pakistan to do my dissertation research on the Polio Eradication Initiative. This six-billion-dollar initiative is the largest coordinated public health project ever, but the goal of eradicating polio from the earth has thus far proved elusive. My research explored why eradication was proving so difficult in Pakistan, one of the last four countries with endemic polio. I spent one year doing fieldwork, over ten months of which was in Pakistan. I was interested in the links between the local and the global, which required ethnographic research in a number of places: communities on the receiving end of house-to-house immunization and surveillance, the local bureaucracies carrying out surveillance and immunization campaigns, and the offices of polio eradication officials in Islamabad, Geneva, and Atlanta. My book, "Chasing Polio in Pakistan: Why the Global Polio Eradication Initiative May Fail" (Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), describes the power relations that both make the Polio Eradication Initiative possible and foster resistance to international mandates by the local government workers responsible for conducting door-to-door immunization campaigns.

I have also been involved with projects aiming to improve health care access in the United States, providing advocacy to Medicare recipients in Los Angeles County and to recent South Asian immigrants in Atlanta.