Vaccine Anxieties

This book explores how parents understand and engage with childhood vaccination in contrasting global contexts. This rapidly advancing and universal technology has sparked dramatic controversy, whether over MMR in the UK or oral polio vaccines in Nigeria. Combining a fresh anthropological perspective with detailed field research, the book examines anxieties emerging as highly globalized vaccine technologies and technocracies encounter the deeply intimate personal and social worlds of parenting and childcare, and how these are part of transforming science-society relations.

Melissa Leach is a social anthropologist and Professonal Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK James Fairhead is Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK