Seeing Like a Research Project: Producing “High-Quality Data” in AIDS Research in Malawi

Numbers are the primary way that we know about AIDS in Africa, yet their power and utility often obscure the conditions of their production. I show that quantification is very much a sociocultural process by focusing on everyday realities of making AIDS-related numbers in Malawi. "Seeing like a research project" implies systematically transforming social reality into data points and managing uncertainties inherent in numbers. Drawing on 20 …