Participation as Inclusion and Exclusion

Policing the Boundaries of 'Citizenship' in Roma Health Mediation

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2392040
AutoresCharlotte Kühlbrandt (0000-0001-9949-8627, King's College London, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen24
Número3
Páginas430-443
Fecha de publicación2019-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSociological Research Online (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1360-7804 • E-ISSN: 1360-7804
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1360780419837233
OpenAlexW2939686747
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas14

Participatory health interventions have long been advocated as an approach to help marginalised community members exercise their rights as citizens, including access to health care. More than two decades ago, the Roma health mediation programme was established in Romania as a participatory community health intervention. Mediators are employed specifically to act as intermediaries between 'Roma patients' and local authorities or health professionals, with the overall aim to increase trust and improve access to health care. Based on data gathered during a year of ethnographic fieldwork with Roma health mediators in Romania, including participant observation and interviews, this article analyses the social processes by which participatory approaches produce both social inclusion and exclusion. It illustrates how mediators exceeded their remit of health and attempted to discipline communities into forms of neoliberal citizenship. Mediators reframed access to health care not as a right that community members already have, but as a benefit that must be individually 'earned' through the fulfilment of neoliberal citizenship. The article argues that far from being an 'empowering tool', community participation can extend the power of governing institutions and thereby may in fact contribute to the maintenance of a political status quo that perpetuates the precarisation of marginalised communities

Citizen journalism · Citizenship · Health care · Mediation · Participant observation · Participatory action research · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social exclusion · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare · Law · Romani and Gypsy Studies