Westerners have long imagined, represented, and treated islands around the globe as “natural laboratories” given their perceived geographic isolation. It was on islands that colonizers first conducted “experiments” in imperial expansion via the establishment of plantation economies and maritime military infrastructure, and where scientists developed myriad ecological, evolutionary, and anthropological theories predicated on views of islands as enclosed systems containing human and nonhuman subjects amenable to scientific observation. In this way, island isolation represents an enduring mythology fundamental to the entangled projects of settler colonialism, militarism, and scientific knowledge production. This dissertation examines the meaning-making processes that continue to uphold myths of isolation in contemporary scientific practice, focusing on an emerging genetic engineering technology known as gene drive.

This examination is organized into three chapters. Chapter 1 considers the historical basis of the myth of the isolated island laboratory, focusing on appropriations of Pacific Islands as military outposts and sites of nuclear weapons testing. Against this history, it considers the incommensurability of the conception of island isolation with Indigenous relations to islands as connected (not isolated) by the ocean. Chapter 2 examines presumptions of island isolation embedded in calls to trial genetically engineered organisms containing gene drives on remote islands. The third and final chapter provides an account of an ethnographic investigation of emergent community and stakeholder engagement practices meant to facilitate just decision-making surrounding the deployment of gene drive technologies, focusing on two Hawaiian Islands where gene drive research is underway. I identify isolation and containment as salient frames structuring scientific practices related to gene drives, and argue that these are ill-equipped to facilitate the just use of these technologies. I invite a reimagination of gene drive science and engagement through more oceanic and archipelagic ways of knowing that embrace connectivity and attend to history and power.

There are many stories of tuberculosis: of its causes and consequences, of social injustices, of public health reform, and of the communities, individuals and families impacted by the disease. By considering the multifaceted narratives of tuberculosis, this research aims to develop a better understanding of how representations of the disease are connected with their materializations across global and local contexts. My mixed-methods research combines an ethnographic study of the Tuberculosis Control and Refugee Health Program at San Diego County's Public Health Department; analysis of contemporary media; and historical research on public health debates and policy related tuberculosis control locally, regionally and globally.

In my dissertation, I examine the frictions between regional public health efforts and universally mandated protocols that define the problem of tuberculosis and the solutions to its control. A central focus of this project is an interrogation of normative culture and expectations for cure by shifting focus away from the micropractices of illness prevention that are implicated in the regulation of non-normative, othered bodies. Looking at misfits between globally defined public health regimes and local clinical public heath practice, my research questions the logic of the current model of "cure as prevention" with its focus on [non]compliant individuals, including how this focus sidelines consideration of the aspects of the disease and its containment that are socially produced or that vary across cultural and geographic place.

Investigating the various boundary positions of tuberculosis helps articulate the kinds of negotiations involved in enacting control programs, while reimagining tuberculosis control as a communicative space brings to life the ways that struggles over meaning reflect struggles over the maintenance of power. If dominant discourses of health and cure reinforce the bounds of the abject by positioning the disease as a conundrum of the problem body, reimagining tuberculosis control as a communicative space pushes at the rough edges of normative representation.