Exporting the Miracles: Crip Exceptionalism and the Gift of Freedom

• In Event: Dislocating Crip Exceptionalism

Abstract

This paper explores the program, Medevac Czech, a medical humanitarian intervention funded by the Czech state that provides expert health care to poor, war-affected, and refugee populations. The paper draws out the ways in which recognised forms of disability and illnesses allow for transnationally organised care in what Didier Fassin terms ‘humanitarian government’. The paper asks what biopolitical work Medevac performs in construing the “rehabilitated citizenship” of the Eastern European state through its mission of identifying those “sick/disabled refugees” to give “their humanity back” and, in the process, improve “the international prestige of the Czech republic.”

Presenter

• katerina Kolarova, Department of Gender Studies, School of Humanities, Charles University Prague