Reframing Risk, Health, and Security: Nurses Challenge the National Smallpox Vaccination Program of 2002

• In Event: Racism and Health II

Abstract

This paper explores the way that critical actors can re-work hegemonic scientific knowledge for liberatory ends. This paper uses discourse analysis and a transnational feminist lens to unpack the stance critical nurse organizations took against the Bush Administration’s Smallpox Vaccination Program in 2002. Nurses were at the forefront of articulating a counter-hegemonic discourse that criticized the NSVP as an exploitative program that engendered health risks to themselves and their patients, and as part of the ideological apparatus put in place to justify unprovoked invasion of Iraq. The paper’s methods primarily entail the examination of nurse organization’s rhetorical strategies in their newsletters and other formal publications in response to the Program. The paper highlights nurses’ tactical deployment of scientific data on vaccine risks and anti-imperialist arguments as the primary dimensions of their critiques. The paper demonstrates that nurses’ critique of the Program revealed it as placing undue risk on marginalized nurses (frontline nursing, where the highest concentration of women of color nurses are concentrated) and as furthering an imperialist war agenda. The paper contributes to the field of STS through its focus on the field of science and social movements, particularly how progressive actors have been able to generate and appropriate scientific knowledge to effectively bolster their aims. Moreover, the paper’s interrogation of different approaches to knowledge production between established institutions and progressive movements reveal the role that gender, race, and nation in conflicting visions of national health and security.

Author

• Gwen D'Arcangelis, Skidmore College