Alex Nading
Alex Nading is a PhD. Candidate in Cultural Anthropology. In November 2007, he will begin research for his dissertation, entitled “Dengue in the Landscape: Waste Management and Disease Ecologies in Urban Nicaragua.” He will study the interactions and conflicts that have emerged among the residents of Ciudad Sandino, a low-income suburb of Managua , who are struggling to deal with the related problems of waste control and dengue fever epidemics. Alex will be working with three groups: participants in an informal “garbage economy” who collect, sell, and recycle waste; garbage collectors in a struggling public collection service; and a civilian public health corps coping with epidemics not only of dengue but also of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which breeds in the piles of scrap metal, plastic, and rubber that dot the landscape and acts as the animal vector for dengue fever, is another key player in the story.
Through his research, Alex will attempt to bring ideas about risk, human-animal relations, and the construction of public and private space in the urban landscape to bear in the context of poverty and a global resurgence of infectious disease. His study of Ciudad Sandino will ask how actors explain disease ecology by drawing not only on biomedical categories but also on everyday experiences confronting dengue in the landscape as patients and healers. His aim is to provide a practice-based study of how citizens blend biomedical and experiential knowledge into historically, geographically, and politically situated disease narratives.
Alex completed his B.A. in Anthropology and English at the University of Virginia and received an M.A. (with Distinction) in the Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation from the University of Sussex ( Brighton , UK ). His research has been supported by the University of Wisconsin-Madison 's Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Center , the Transdisicplinary Studies in Health and Society Working Group, and the Scott Kloeck-Jenson Foundation of the Global Studies Center . He has received a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and he is a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellow for 2007-2008.
Alex Nading's web page: https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/nading/homepage/index.html
