Race, Modernity, and Hospital-ity: Questioning the Intervention Space of Clinical Volunteerism

• In Event: Black Feminist Health Science Studies: Exploring New Possibilities

Abstract

International clinical volunteerism is a booming industry in which volunteers, with or without medical training, get to experience work in foreign hospitals, generally in low- and middle-income countries. This paper will present some of the many mechanisms by which international clinical volunteers and the volunteer partner organizations (Sullivan 2017) that organize their efforts work on the ground and on the web to assemble an object, the needy-third-world-country, that requires their intervention. More importantly, this paper will show how work on the needy-third-world-country, is actually mediated through the unregulated provision of “care” upon the bodies of the global poor. In the everyday, this care manifests along with volunteers presentations of themselves as expert by virtue of a relationship with modernity. As I will argue, this arrangement is mediated by the fact that the recipients of this care are overwhelmingly black and brown, a fact that aids in volunteer imaginings of a needy-third-world-country in the first place. I draw the conclusions presented in this paper from fieldwork among international clinical volunteers and analysis of volunteer partner organizations websites. This paper’s main contribution to STS is to show, using a Black feminist perspective, how mainstream discourses about the heroics of “modern” medicine help to produce new and old objects for intervention and, more importantly, subjects of unscientific care.

Author

• Yesmar Semaj Oyarzun, Rice University