Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
24
2014

Teaching/Learning among Medical Volunteers in Tanzania

When: Friday, October 24, 2014
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 1902 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Krzysztof Kozubski  

Group: Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

Co-Sponsor: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Buffett Center Faculty & Fellows Colloquium
The Politics of 'Making a Difference': Teaching/Learning in the Narratives of Medical Volunteers in Tanzania

Noelle Sullivan, Global Health Studies & Anthropology

Noelle Sullivan is a critical medical anthropologist who focuses on understanding global health as a set of practices that bring a vast array of people, ideas, technologies, values, and modes of governance together. In both past and present work, she explores the spaces of encounter generated through global health initiatives, as global and national values and policies get infused into local realities. Sullivan’s current research expands over two projects, which explore international medical electives (IMEs) and volunteerism in healthcare facilities in the global South. One of these projects takes place in Tanzania, exploring on the one hand the ways that hospitals market themselves as sites for ‘global health experiences’ in order to generate income and transnational relationships, and on the other hand, how volunteers, healthcare workers, and patients interact in order to achieve their desires or goals within these spaces of encounter.

The other project interviews students and professionals in the Chicagoland area who previously went on IMEs or volunteer placements within clinical spaces in so-called ‘developing’ countries in order to explore the diversity of motivations, experiences, connections, and reflections that result from these kinds of global health encounters.

Sullivan is also in the process of developing her dissertation, “Negotiating abundance and scarcity: health sector reform, development aid, and biomedical practice in a Tanzanian hospital” into a book. This study traces shifts in global and national health priorities and governance regimes impacting Tanzania, and explores the opportunities opened up and closed down by donor and state prioritizations of certain populations or illnesses over others. This project further illuminates the ways that foreign interests and structural adjustment programs have allowed some health facilities in Africa to become spaces of performance, where a wide array of actors can mobilize ideas of ‘benevolence’, ‘need’, ‘accountability’, ‘resource deficiency,’ ‘vulnerability’ and various other images and counter images of the ‘African hospital’ in order to elicit support for highly targeted interventions in the name of health.

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