Dr. Crane’s book Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, Expertise, and the Rise of American Global Health Science (Cornell University Press, 2013) uses fieldwork conducted in the U.S. and Uganda to track how Africa has moved from being largely excluded from advancements in HIV medicine to key locus of knowledge production in global health and HIV research. The U.S. response to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, she argues, is shaping the landscape of postcolonial science by generating new forms of collaboration and contestation between American and Ugandan researchers.
In the past, she has conducted research on HIV and poverty in the United States. In this project, she documented how welfare policies stemming from the “War on Drugs” created a perverse disincentive for individuals to prevent and/or treat HIV infection by limiting benefits only to those with an advanced AIDS diagnosis.
