2011 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference (Seattle, 12-16 April)
Session Organizers: Matthew Sparke & Meghann Ormond
Tuesday, 4/12/11, from 12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in 2A - Washington State Convention Center Level 2
Forged in the context of globalization, global health policies and practices have significantly denationalized older traditions of international health and public health. The complex processes of reterritorialization involved raise diverse research challenges for geographers ranging from the macro mapping of global disease etiologies and responses aimed at the world’s poor to investigating the micro geographies of risk management by the privileged consumers of personalized and privatized medicine. This session approaches these concerns with reterritorialization by examining a diverse set of global health care scenes around the world. Designed to care for people and address health problems that have been cut off from publicly provided national health services, these new global health care scenes are supported and staffed through diverse global ties and space-spanning movements of medicine. At the same time, though, they simultaneously reveal all sorts of ways in which care is geographically enclaved and assembled in particularistic, post-national ways. Instead, of spaces of exception, therefore, they present us with a window on to fractured scenes of global health care diversely defined by new processes of individuation, experimentation and exploitation.
Todd Faubion, University of Washington
Paper 2: Health clinic enclaves: Micro-territorializing global health
Patricia Lopez, University of Washington
Paper 3: Medical travel guidebooks and the production of landscapes of care
Meghann Ormond, Wageningen University, and Matthew Sothern, University of St Andrews
Paper 4: Assembling around the ageing body: working the care/cure, global/local distinctions
Parvati Raghuram, Open University
Paper 5: The Geography of Global Health Targets and the Enclaving of Aid and Research
Matthew Sparke, University of Washington
Chair: Margaret W. Walton-Roberts, Wilfrid Laurier University
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Session: Mobilizing Care: Uneven Geographies and the Spatial Governance of Global Health
Session Organizers: Margaret W. Walton-Roberts, Wilfred Laurier University, and Mark Lawrence Santiago, University of British Colombia
Wednesday, 4/13/2011, from 2:40 PM - 4:20 PM in Ballard - Sheraton Hotel, Pike Tower, Third Floor
Showing exactly how economic injustice creates poverty and ill health is a challenge for much work on global health, but analyzing such practices is necessary in order to encourage effective responses from governments and relevant supranational bodies. Global health inequalities and inequities are a product of, and sustain, the current market system. The challenge for researchers keen to demonstrate how multiple injustices shape health is to rescale their impact from the macro to the meso and the micro scale across various contexts, including the pharmaceutical trade, medical outsourcing, health worker migration, medical tourism, organ and surrogacy trade. These sessions aim to address the issue of global health at several scales, but with the overall aim of demonstrating how global political economic processes are rescaled to the level of the individual, institutions and vice versa, and by what means such processes construct and reproduce landscapes of health and health care inequality and inequity.
Paper 1: Importing Nurses: Needs, Rights and Care
Kim England, University of Washington
Paper 2: Global nurses, rural nurses: divides and disconnects between international nurse migration and health care delivery in India
Margaret W. Walton-Roberts, Wilfred Laurier University
Paper 3: Producing Global Nurses: Ethical Recruitment and the Labor Brokerage State
Mark Lawrence Santiago, University of British Colombia
Paper 4: Who are Canada's medical tourists? An account of Canadians' involvement in medical tourism from the perspectives of facilitators
Rory Johnston, Simon Fraser University
Paper 5: Do You Know the Way to San José? Medical Tourism in Costa Rica
Barney Warf, University of Kansas
Chair: Meghann Ormond, Wageningen University
