ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Circulating Care: Universities, Hospitals, and the Making of Medical Expertise

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

How is medical expertise produced, circulated, and transformed across universities, hospitals, and political terrains? This panel showcases how knowledge, labor, and authority are shaped by race, gender, and institutional structures. They argue that expertise is not neutral and emerges through practices that are materially and socially situated, revealing how care and knowledge co-constitute one another.
First, Dr. Kumbhar traces the rapid expansion of medical colleges in India from 2011 to 2025, situating it within postcolonial medical education policy. Statistical metrics and policy discourses about physician shortages transformed expertise from a professional ideal into a scalable national resource, producing new hierarchies of training, authority, and employability. Secondly, Dalena Ngo follows the relationship between U.S. academic medical centers and Catholic hospitals, which extend care into underserved regions while imposing ethical constraints on reproductive and trans-healthcare. Expertise circulates through clinical training, institutional doctrines, and market logics, revealing how care is simultaneously technical, moral, and politically negotiated. Lastly, Kipgen analyzes the 20th General Hospital in Assam, India, during World War II, where American physicians attempted to transplant a universal hospital model into a colonial and militarized environment. Logistical instability, unfamiliar diseases, and racialized labor hierarchies, including locally recruited “number one boys,” show how knowledge was actively remade in practice. Together, the papers demonstrate that circulating care reshapes medical expertise while exposing the ethical, racial, and political hierarchies embedded in its production. By tracing knowledge as it travels, stabilizes, and transforms across institutions and regions, the panel highlights the contested nature of modern medical authority.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Rosanna Dent, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• The "doctor-population ratio" and the metric fixation in Indian health policy (1947-2025) - Kiran kumbhar, University of Pennsylvania

• University Affiliations: Academic Health systems and their discontents - Dalena Ngo, Yale University

• Physicians in the Wild: How American medical expertise Was Racialized, Reworked, and Stabilized in Northeast Indian frontiers - Ngamlienlal Kipgen

Session Organizer

• Ngamlienlal Kipgen