Global health's durable dreams

Ethnography, 'Community Health Workers' and Health Without Health Infrastructure

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2103511
AutoresRamah Mckay (0000-0003-0577-4171, autor correspondente)
Ano2020
Volume90
Fascículo1
Páginas95-111
Data de publicação2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAfrica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0001-9720 • E-ISSN: 1750-0184
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0001972019000950
OpenAlexW3011984784
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas7
Referências citadas50

Tracing the persistence of community health workers (CHWs) as a key category in both global health policy and anthropological representation, this article asks how enduring scholarly investments in CHWs can reveal changing political stakes for both health work and ethnographic research. Amid renewed calls for a focus on health systems and universal health coverage, the article suggests that the durability of attention to CHWs is instructive. It simultaneously points to the imbrication of health with political and social relations and clinical and technological infrastructures as well as to how ethnographic investments in health systems can sometimes obscure the ambivalent politics of health. Drawing on fieldwork with CHWs, NGO staff and public health officials, and on public health literature on CHWs, it argues for greater attention to the political ambivalence of health labour. It suggests that the experiences of health workers themselves can serve as analytical examples in this regard, pointing to analyses that begin not with normative notions of health systems or the conceptual boundaries of global health 'projects' but with a focus on the contested relations through which health labour is realized over time. Such attention can also indicate possibilities for health beyond dreams of projects, clinics or health systems

Ambivalence · Ethnography · Global health · Health promotion · International health · Normative · Political science · Politics · Public health · Public relations · Sociology · Anthropology · Child Nutrition and Water Access · Global Health and Surgery · Global Maternal and Child Health · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology · Social Psychology · Health Policy