Portrait of a male person of color with glasses and dark hair pulled back, wearing a blue shirt.
Dr. Sung-Joon Park   ©Jacqueline Häußler

Dr. Sung-Joon Park

Team Leader

My name is Sung-Joon Park. I studied anthropology at the Martin-Luther-University in Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). I have been working at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology, the Seminar for Anthropology at the University of Halle, and the Institute for Anthropology at the University of Leipzig.

My ethnographic field research focuses on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, where I work on Ebola epidemics, the Covid-19 pandemic, the political ecology of disease outbreaks, the ethics of care, mobility, and trust and mistrust. I approach these topics through ethnographic field research and with an interest in social theoretical questions. Most importantly this approach builds on longterm collaborations with research partners in the field.   

In my research I want to revisit scientific models of transdisciplinary research in the field of global health. I am interested to revisit the question what counts as evidence, knowledge, certainty  in different disciplines in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Equally I am interested how ideas of decolonizing research can provide new impulses for transdisciplinary research in health.

These interests will be explored concretely in the case of past, present, and future public health emergencies in African countries.

Research interests: Ebola outbreaks, Anthropology of Epidemics, Planetary Health, Mistrust, Atmospheres and Emotions, Values and Evaluations.

E-Mail: sung.park@bnitm.de

 

 

 

Publications

Park, Sung Joon, and Richard Rottenburg, eds. [forth]. A Book of Exercises in STS. On Futures and Designs of Collective Life. Mattering Press.

Park, Sung-Joon, et al. 2022 “‚Ebola is a business‘: An analysis of the atmosphere of mistrust in the tenth Ebola epidemic in the DRC.” Critical Public Health; https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2128990

Park, Sung-Joon. 2021. “Deadly secret: Situating the unknowing and knowing of the source of the Ebola epidemic in Northern Uganda.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (2): 227–44.

Dilger, Hansjörg, and Sung-Joon Park. 2020. “Anthropological Perspectives in Health Emergencies.” In In Control: A Practical Handbook for Professionals Working in Health Emergencies Internationally, edited by Silva Lauffer, and Jonathan Walter, 154–64. Berlin: RKI.

Morisho, Nene, Josepha Kalubi, Sung-Joon Park, and Martin Doevenspeck. 2020. “Same but Different? A Comparison of Ebola Virus Disease and Covid-19 After the Ebola Epidemic in Eastern DRC (2018–20).” African Argumentsafricanarguments.org/2020/04/24/same-but-different-a-comparison-of-ebola-virus-disease-and-covid-19-after-the-ebola-epidemic-in-eastern-drc-2018-20/

Park, Sung-Joon, Nene Morisho, Kennedy Wema Muhindo, Julienne Anoko, Nina Gobat, Hannah Brown, and Matthias Borchert. 2020. “What do adaptations tell us about the production of trust? Shifting the ‘burden of change’ from people to the response.” Humanitarian Exchange: Special feature Responding to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo 22 24–26.

Park, Sung-Joon.  2019. “Thinking-with favorite reads in the anthropology of global health and environmental health.” Curare 42 (1+2):

Park, Sung-Joon.  2017. “’They overworked us’: Humiliation and claims to recognition of volunteer nurses in the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 4 (3): 21–40.

Park, Sung-Joon, and Grace Akello. 2017. “The oughtness of care: Fear, stress, and caregiving during the 2000-2001 Ebola outbreak in Gulu, Uganda.” Social Science & Medicine194 60–66.

Park, Sung-Joon. 2012. “Stock-outs in global health: Pharmaceutical governance and uncertainties in the global supply of ARVs in Uganda.” 177–94.

Park, Sung-Joon. 2015. “’Nobody is Going to Die‘: An Ethnography of Hope, Indicators, and Improvisations in the Provision of Access to Treatment in Uganda.” In The World of Indicators, edited by Richard Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, Sung Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler, 188–220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rottenburg, Richard, Sally Engle Merry, Sung-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler. 2015. The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Park, Sung-Joon. 2014. Pharmaceutical Government: An Ethnography of Stock-Outs and the Institutionalization of Antiretroviral Therapy in Uganda. Halle.

Park, Sung-Joon, and Rene Umlauf. 2014. “Caring as existential insecurity: quarantine, care, and human insecurity in the Ebola crisis.” Somatosphere November 2 (http://somatosphere.net/2014/11/caring-as-existential-insecurity.html):

Behrends, Andrea, Sung-Joon Park, and Richard Rottenburg. 2014. “Travelling Models in African Conflict Management: Translating Technologies of Social Ordering.”

 

Research Group Medical Anthropology

  • [Translate to English:] The logo shows the letters D, F and G on a white background, next to the lettering "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft".
  • [Translate to English:] Large and small black dots Volkswagen Stiftung