DISEASE AND MARKETS
The sociology of health and illness examines how sickness and wellbeing are distributed across populations, and how the social order justifies and reproduces the patterns it observes. Rates of disease are never spread evenly: they track class, race, gender, geography, and access to power. This subfield asks why some groups fall ill more often, why some illnesses are treated as urgent crises and others as background noise, and how societies build institutions, narratives, and moral judgments around who is sick and why.
The sociology of markets, from a different angle, treats markets not as natural or purely economic phenomena but as social constructions. Markets do not simply emerge from supply and demand; they are built through networks of actors, institutions, regulations, professional norms, and shared beliefs about value. Prices, exchanges, and even the categories of what can be bought and sold are the outcome of ongoing social negotiation, not fixed technical facts.
Bringing these two lenses together, this project investigates how diseases, and the research conducted about them, gain in social consideration — that is, how a given illness moves from being a private, localized, or neglected concern to becoming a matter of broad scientific attention, funding, and public legitimacy. This shift in consideration is not automatic: it depends on advocacy, media coverage, the visibility of affected populations, and the interests of the institutions that could invest in a response.
Malaria offers a particularly instructive case. It is a disease whose burden falls overwhelmingly on low-income tropical regions, which has historically limited the commercial incentives for pharmaceutical investment relative to diseases affecting wealthier markets. Yet malaria has also mobilized an extensive ecosystem of public and philanthropic funding, global health institutions, diagnostic and vaccine manufacturers, insecticide-treated bed net producers, and research consortia. Studying malaria therefore allows us to trace, concretely, how a health-related economic market takes shape: how scientific findings are translated into commercial products, how global health organizations set priorities that shape demand, how philanthropic capital substitutes for or complements traditional market incentives, and how affected communities are positioned — as beneficiaries, consumers, or research subjects — within the resulting exchange structures.
By following malaria research and its downstream markets, we aim to understand more broadly how the social recognition of a disease and the economic structures built around it are mutually constitutive: consideration attracts investment, and investment, in turn, reshapes which forms of consideration are possible.