Description:

Medicine’s Backyard: Community Health Workers and the Making of a Global Medical South in the United States

Dr. Tine Hanrieder

Head of the research group Global Humanitarian Medicine, WZB Berlin
Social Science Center
Faculty member, Berlin Graduate School for Global and Transregional Studies (BGTS)

Community health workers (CHWs) are simply trained health outreach and education workers, who have long been celebrated as a crucial health workforce in developing countries. An ongoing CHW “boom” across the United States now heralds them as a model of “reverse innovation” from the Global South. The talk discusses how this boom, while transcending national boundaries, at the same time re-articulates the social, scientific, bureaucratic, and emotional boundaries of medicine in US society.