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Abstract
What ends with the end of privatized healthcare? This thesis is an ethnography of a collapse. Put differently, it’s an ethnography of healthcare when capitalism reaches an apex of crisis; when prices, social relations, identities and structures become unmoored and in flux. Among microbiologists, nurses, pharmacists, grassroots medication distributors, and physicians in Lebanon’s economic collapse, I show in the chapters of this thesis how collapse is not an end, but a re-organization and a transformation. In private hospitals, neighborhood pharmacies, microbiological research laboratories, and medication distribution campaigns, this thesis documents this transformation as it plays out in a highly privatized healthcare system. In this thesis, I suggest that economic collapse not only takes place at the level of a national economy, but also at the register of agentive changes in routinized everyday behavior—what I have called the enactments of collapse. These enactments participate in widening a field of struggle around privatized healthcare, opening up spaces of doing things differently. Even if contested and incremental, such widenings may reverberate into the politics of healthcare in Lebanon for years to come.