Anthony Rizk

• Presentation
• Research outputs

Primary fields of research

I am trained as a medical anthropologist and work on various topics related to the political economy of health, with a particular interest in how people’s everyday interactions and experiences with healthcare produce, reproduce or contest capitalist economic formations. I am due to defend my PhD dissertation at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) in September 2024. My doctoral thesis follows a range of healthcare workers—microbiologists, nurses, pharmacists and doctors—as they navigated Lebanon’s financial crisis and economic collapse in 2021-22. The PhD dissertation explores the question of what ends with the end of a highly privatized healthcare system, and the spaces of conviviality that could open up under conditions of severe medical austerity. Beyond this, my research trajectory has taken me in different directions, with work that is developing in the areas of the collapse of privatized healthcare, the political and economic stakes of cross-border pathogen and data sharing, the blind-spots of global pharmaceutical distribution, and thinking broadly about ‘the end of healthcare’ and the embodiment of financial capitalism and its crises. I have a geographic interest in Lebanon, the Middle East and Arab contexts.

Current research

I am a postdoctoral fellow on Professor Klaus Høyer's ERC-funded DataSpace project, where I work on what makes pathogens and their associated data valuable, and how this value is negotiated. This research is premised on the observation that the ways we spatially and digitally store data tells us something about how we value it.

Teaching

My teaching interests include:

- Research design and proposal writing in the social sciences
- Social and critical theory in the health sciences
- Medical anthropology and anthropology of global health / biosciences
- Political economy of health