Noelle Sullivan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3612143 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Noelle Sullivan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Noelle |
| FAMILY NAME | Sullivan |
| SIGNATURE | SULLIVAN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0888-6366 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Pushpin memoir
In 2018, my brother Adam Colquhoun, nicknamed "Stretch," was killed in a bar in Calgary, Alberta by a man he barely knew. Stretch was the kind of person society finds convenient to discard. His history of theft, illicit drug dealing, mental illness, addiction, and homelessness made his humanity "undesirable." Nevertheless, lessons Stretch learned painfully over his lifetime had something to teach us. In 2016, he told me he wanted someone to write…
Hospital side hustles
Like a real hospital
This article traces a shift in how hospital workers at a Tanzanian public hospital thought about their workplace. In 2010, for the first time, staff began collectively imagining what they called 'a real hospital'. This collective dreaming of institutional possibilities emerged due to two transformations: a shift in Tanzanian government policies enabling government institutions to initiate their own 'public-private partnerships' (PPPs) with non-st…
International clinical volunteering in Tanzania
This article traces how scarcities characteristic of health systems in low-income countries (LICs), and increasing popular interest in Global Health, have inadvertently contributed to the popularisation of a specific Global Health business: international clinical volunteering through private volunteer placement organisations (VPOs). VPOs market neglected health facilities as sites where foreigners can 'make a difference', regardless of their skil…
Good Intentions and Murky Ethics
Multiple accountabilities
Accountability and transparency are considered best practices within development cooperation frameworks characteristic of global health practice today. In this article, I ask: How do accountability and transparency work, and for whom? I develop three main arguments. Drawing on Geissler’s concept ‘unknowing,’ I first demonstrate that global health actors are aware, yet strategically obscure, the instabilities and problematics of data and indicator…
Hospital (In)Visibilities
Volunteer Economies
Across Africa today, as development activities animate novel forms of governance, new social actors are emerging, among them the volunteer. Yet, where work and resources are limited, volunteer practices have repercussions that raise contentious ethical issues. What has been the real impact of volunteers economically, politically and in society? The interdisciplinary experts in this collection examine the practices of volunteers - both internation…
Enacting Spaces of Inequality
Based on ethnographic research conducted in a government hospital in Tanzania, this article explores how global and state governance molds hospital spaces. While some spaces in the hospital are made global through regimes of governance, others—by virtue of being beyond state/donor interest—remain decidedly local. The unequal material configurations characteristic of layered hospital spaces mean that some actors can realize meaningful identities a…
Mediating Abundance and Scarcity
While free antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Tanzania has undeniably increased accessibility of services, the effects of ART programs as they are brought into existing health facilities are more ambiguous. As transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) establish clinics within government hospitals, we see a telling example of how NGOs are providing services from within the state. The conditions of NGO-operated clinics within government healt…
Negotiating Professionalism, Economics and Moral Obligation
This article provides a preliminary framework of useful methodologies and topics for future ethnographic research on medical migration from Africa to North America. We argue that medical professionals’ migrations must be understood in terms of their multiple struggles for meaning as they negotiate their professional and personal preferences in light of their desires to help rebuild ailing medical systems in their countries of origin. Our ethnogra…
Mediating Abundance and Scarcity
While free antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Tanzania has undeniably increased accessibility of services, the effects of ART programs as they are brought into existing health facilities are more ambiguous. As transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) establish clinics within government hospitals, we see a telling example of how NGOs are providing services from within the state. The conditions of NGO-operated clinics within government healt…
Volunteer Economies
Across Africa today, as development activities animate novel forms of governance, new social actors are emerging, among them the volunteer. Yet, where work and resources are limited, volunteer practices have repercussions that raise contentious ethical issues. What has been the real impact of volunteers economically, politically and in society? The interdisciplinary experts in this collection examine the practices of volunteers - both internation…
Enacting Spaces of Inequality
Based on ethnographic research conducted in a government hospital in Tanzania, this article explores how global and state governance molds hospital spaces. While some spaces in the hospital are made global through regimes of governance, others—by virtue of being beyond state/donor interest—remain decidedly local. The unequal material configurations characteristic of layered hospital spaces mean that some actors can realize meaningful identities a…
Hospital side hustles
Like a real hospital
This article traces a shift in how hospital workers at a Tanzanian public hospital thought about their workplace. In 2010, for the first time, staff began collectively imagining what they called 'a real hospital'. This collective dreaming of institutional possibilities emerged due to two transformations: a shift in Tanzanian government policies enabling government institutions to initiate their own 'public-private partnerships' (PPPs) with non-st…
Negotiating Professionalism, Economics and Moral Obligation
This article provides a preliminary framework of useful methodologies and topics for future ethnographic research on medical migration from Africa to North America. We argue that medical professionals’ migrations must be understood in terms of their multiple struggles for meaning as they negotiate their professional and personal preferences in light of their desires to help rebuild ailing medical systems in their countries of origin. Our ethnogra…
Mediating Abundance and Scarcity
While free antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Tanzania has undeniably increased accessibility of services, the effects of ART programs as they are brought into existing health facilities are more ambiguous. As transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) establish clinics within government hospitals, we see a telling example of how NGOs are providing services from within the state. The conditions of NGO-operated clinics within government healt…
Enacting Spaces of Inequality
Based on ethnographic research conducted in a government hospital in Tanzania, this article explores how global and state governance molds hospital spaces. While some spaces in the hospital are made global through regimes of governance, others—by virtue of being beyond state/donor interest—remain decidedly local. The unequal material configurations characteristic of layered hospital spaces mean that some actors can realize meaningful identities a…
Multiple accountabilities
Accountability and transparency are considered best practices within development cooperation frameworks characteristic of global health practice today. In this article, I ask: How do accountability and transparency work, and for whom? I develop three main arguments. Drawing on Geissler’s concept ‘unknowing,’ I first demonstrate that global health actors are aware, yet strategically obscure, the instabilities and problematics of data and indicator…
Hospital (In)Visibilities
Volunteer Economies
Across Africa today, as development activities animate novel forms of governance, new social actors are emerging, among them the volunteer. Yet, where work and resources are limited, volunteer practices have repercussions that raise contentious ethical issues. What has been the real impact of volunteers economically, politically and in society? The interdisciplinary experts in this collection examine the practices of volunteers - both internation…
International clinical volunteering in Tanzania
This article traces how scarcities characteristic of health systems in low-income countries (LICs), and increasing popular interest in Global Health, have inadvertently contributed to the popularisation of a specific Global Health business: international clinical volunteering through private volunteer placement organisations (VPOs). VPOs market neglected health facilities as sites where foreigners can 'make a difference', regardless of their skil…
Good Intentions and Murky Ethics
Hospital side hustles
Like a real hospital
This article traces a shift in how hospital workers at a Tanzanian public hospital thought about their workplace. In 2010, for the first time, staff began collectively imagining what they called 'a real hospital'. This collective dreaming of institutional possibilities emerged due to two transformations: a shift in Tanzanian government policies enabling government institutions to initiate their own 'public-private partnerships' (PPPs) with non-st…
Pushpin memoir
In 2018, my brother Adam Colquhoun, nicknamed "Stretch," was killed in a bar in Calgary, Alberta by a man he barely knew. Stretch was the kind of person society finds convenient to discard. His history of theft, illicit drug dealing, mental illness, addiction, and homelessness made his humanity "undesirable." Nevertheless, lessons Stretch learned painfully over his lifetime had something to teach us. In 2016, he told me he wanted someone to write…
Political science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Public relations (6 works) · Socioeconomics (6 works) · Tanzania (6 works) · Economic growth (5 works) · Global Maternal and Child Health (5 works) · Law (5 works)