ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on knowledge production about tuberculosis in post-Soviet Georgia amid the shifting standards of TB management, diagnosis, and treatment. The analysis centers on how TB professionals working in a laboratory produce diagnoses of tuberculosis, and how incarcerated men take up the project of achieving a TB diagnosis as a survival strategy. The ethnographic analysis foregrounds diagnosis as a process of enactment and as a strategic event that is mobilized and transformed, rather than a static nosology or definition. As diagnostic practices travel from laboratories into sites of detention, new meanings of tuberculosis are produced as incarcerated men transform the meanings and effects of a diagnosis into a survival strategy that could potentially improve the conditions in which they are detained. Subsequently, back in the laboratory, their efforts to achieve a TB diagnosis are enacted in ways that call into question the morality of those in detention.
