It’s also the System’. Republican Dilemmas in French Tuberculosis Prevention

Published May 2019.

This chapter engages ethnographically with the ways TB control is practiced and problematized in France. TB control is part of a larger state apparatus, where republican dilemmas and paradoxes, characteristic of French politics, as well as pragmatic arrangements, characteristic of public health, occur: differing treatments despite an ideal of equality; and the conditioning of preventive actions by an inegalitarian social and political system with conflicting priorities of inclusion and exclusion. With this chapter, I contribute to understanding the social, political and medical stakes and dilemmas of tuberculosis control in a low-burden country in which tuberculosis exists primarily as an immigrant’s disease.