Forms of Global Health

My dissertation responds to recent calls for a critical medical humanities and a literature of global health by first investigating the function of literature in the development of earlier specialties in international health, with tropical medicine at the turn of the twentieth century as a key example. Scholarship in history and rhetoric of the period has described the formation of modern disciplines as a separation of scientific and literary textual traditions, predicated on the rise of distinct genres for the production of scientific knowledge, namely the scientific article, the case study, and the medical report. These genres were certainly used by key specialists of the tropics to establish a new rhetoric for description and to reduce the role of the imagination when dealing with human and geographic difference. Yet their writing on sub-Saharan Africa continued to signal a disciplinary disorder. Malaria, in particular, demanded the use of scene and figuration for the classification of space, ecologies, diseases and natives--rhetoric derived from literary genres, particularly the travelogue, memoir and novella. The result is a corpus I call malaria literature, one that includes works as disparate as Richard Burton's travel account, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Patrick Manson's textbook, Tropical Diseases: Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), AR Paterson's pamphlet, A Guide to the Prevention of Malaria in Kenya (1935) and Isak Dinesen's memoir, Out of Africa (1937). I read these five texts as part of an undisciplined library underwriting the construction of a modern medical specialty, and thus illustrate how the positivist turn in Africanist discourse became an incomplete effort to distance medical writing from traditions of poesis. Instead of a rupture between the literary and the scientific, I find a sustained epistemic complicity: a set of persistent knowledge-producing relations between both representational modes, where metaphors for space work with microbial notions of contagion to define disease and shape policy. Reading for such complicity, I argue, recasts tropical medicine as a confluence of scientific and literary traditions. It also complicates contemporary notions of medical literature developed after World War II, the birth of the World Health Organization, decolonization and the emergence of global health, and it enables the field of literary studies to enter into debates about the ethics of public health endeavors from a vantage point unique to the study of representations of disease

The Socio-Cultural Implications of Odezuruigbo Cultural Dance Music in Awka, Awka South Local Government Area of Anambra State

Music is an integral part of everyday life in Awka traditional community. It is a very important aspect of their culture. Music accompanies every socio-cultural activity of the people. Consequently, there are varieties of musical types practiced by various categories of people in Awka. This paper is concerned with activities of Odezuruigbo Cultural Dance Music, an outstanding women music group in Awka. It discussed amongst other things the organization and the socio-cultural implications of odezuruigbo cultural dance music. Data for this study were drawn from fieldwork, oral interview and review of related literature. The findings of this study revealed that the impact of odezuruigbo dance group in the life of Awka community is indispensable. It also revealed that some gender dichotomies in the use of some local musical instruments are gradually becoming insignificant. This study recommended that the practice of those socio-cultural festivals which promote the traditional music and dance of the people be encouraged. Key Words: activity, culture, cultural dance, dance music, and odezuruigb

Economic Feasibility Analysis of Shale Gas Extraction from UK’s Carboniferous Bowland-Hodder Shale Unit

For many years, shale gas exploitation has been generating contradictory views in the UK and remains subject of rising debates throughout these years. Favorably backed by the government, looking upon it as potential mechanism for gas import independency and competitiveness in global gas industry while strongly opposed by stakeholders (mainly public), idea of shale gas exploitation remains disputed with no substantial progress in past years. And this irresolution is worsened by obscurity of estimates for potential reserves and conflicting assessments on potential impact of shale gas. Yet, in case shale industry is signaled to search and extract resources, there remains another scrutiny stage that shale industry will be subjected to i.e., its extraction must be economically feasible as extracting unconventional resources is financially expensive and riskier than conventional. Hence, this study aims at analyzing the economics of UK’s most prolific Bowland shale play development by a financial model that discovers gas prices range required to earn capital cost on investment in Bowland shale play and is tested on three development plans where it determines that based on given set of hypothesis and past decade’s average gas price of $6.52/Mcf, none of the development plans hold enough probability of adding value, however, hybrid plan formulated by combination of consistent drilling and refracturing proves as economically sustainable with a RGP mean$7.21/Mcf, significantly lower than $9.76/Mcf mean for ‘drilling only’ plan. It is found that required gas price is most sensitive to initial production rate and drilling costs where ±10% variation offsets RGP by ≈ ±8% and ±7%

Repackaging Igbo folksongs for global acceptance: towards reviving and preserving the musical heritage of a Nigerian community

The entire life of an average Igbo (from cradle to grave) revolves round the arts generally and most especially the musical arts. Many aesthetic features of a wide range of the arts of music, dance and drama fill the lives and environments of Igbo rural communities. As the very essence of culture, folk music forms the basis of people’s tradition and identity. Transmitted orally between generations, it does not necessarily conform to the music of any other culture. However, in some cases it may share common factors, elements or characteristics with those of other ethnic groups around the country. Recent studies have shown that the state of Igbo folksongs in the twenty-first century is not very encouraging. Although a few Igbo musicologists have made arrangements of some of the folksongs, transforming them into art music of some sort, the music has been to a great extent neglected and relegated to the background by the present generation, especially the youth, such that it may eventually become a lost heritage. Unfortunately, many musicologists fail to realise this unhealthy development and consequently do very little or nothing to salvage the situation. This article therefore sets out to draw the attention of Igbo musicologists and all other stakeholders, while highlighting the attempts made so far towards ‘repackaging’ these folksongs for global acceptance and for posterity. Describing these trends holds the potential of creating a better future for the Igbo musical tradition and culture