‘Sticky knowledge’: The political economy of global health science in Uganda

How are inequalities in scientific knowledge production in global public health and development (re)produced? Drawing on multiscalar and multisited ethnographic research in Uganda, this paper elucidates the political economies of blind spots in global health science. It shows how the establishment of research infrastructures in particular places, focusing on particular pathogens and populations, has led to gaps in knowledge that contradict global health’s commitment to reducing inequalities. These are compounded by a funding system that blinds the field to its own blind spots. This reveals what I term ‘stickiness’: path dependencies that shape the production of knowledge which emerge due to systemic difficulties in departing from existing technical arrangements, material and human infrastructures, funding rationalities, and political and scientific consensuses. I thus demonstrate how global health science repeatedly reinscribes its own priorities through the production of knowledge due to the systemic difficulty in departing from the status quo in method, location, topic or population.