28 Oct Argh, Step 4.
Posted at 23:09h
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by maoquai
Grant applications. Four next week. Four! Actually, i think i might skip the Fullbright-Hayes. Yes, i annoyingly re-translate films from three foreign languages into English every time i watch them (ever since the industry moved to automated translation systems, i’ve felt compelled to “help” my fellow movie watchers understand what is really going on). Yes, Rosetta Stone thinks i speak with a fairly attuned Parisian accent, a mildly annoying Castillian accent, and a not-so-good (because i grew up in a tiny town in Saarland – think: one barn right down town for all the cows around) Hoch Deutsche accent. Yes, i read all three languages rather well (German newspapers are slow going and French ones stump me occasionally), but the minute someone speaks directly at me in a foreign language, i freeze. Freeze! That’s a lie, i had a perfectly lovely conversation about poverty among women in America with a taxi cab driver in Tunisia. The next week, as i stopped in Paris on my way home, i was incapable of ordering a salad. “I speak English,” the salad bar boy dripped icily.
I’m digressing. Not because i think the world needs to know how fabulously poorly i actually retain foreign languages but because i really don’t want to get to the point…i’m here because i’m stuck. Again.
I just spent six hours laying out my three main research questions:
1. What are the spatial dynamics of the construction of health citizenship? In what ways is health citizenship spatialized, or not? What role do health camps play in defining health citizenship, for camp inhabitants and on camp inhabitants? How has the uneven health enclaving of displaced people affected perceptions of health citizenship?
2. How are Haitians’ health citizenship being rebuilt (or built for the first time) at the intersection of multiple organizational levels some micro, local and individualized, some macro global and indeed globalized? And in what ways does this practice articulate the groups’ understanding of a new biopolitics in the (re)framing of Haiti?
3. How are discourses of health citizenship invoked by the Government of Haiti, international agencies and non-governmental organizations to construct the public health system as an opportunity to participate in, and capitalize on the re-building of Haiti? In what ways are grassroots movements and community-powered programs being mobilized by the government, NGOs and coordinating bodies to help articulate the desires of the people they work to serve?
So now the so what…? Why am i asking these questions? The plan is to do research at three distinct camps. The first camp will be one of those ones where a ton of money has flown in – high visibility (‘lot’s’ of goodies – in a wholly relative sense). Another will be the Jean William Pape “model city.” And the third will be an un-managed camp. It’s geographic because i sense that the camps are not operating the same. Yeah – actually, everyone knows that. That’s a no-brainer. The most recent PAHO report admits that some “mobile clinics” are nothing more than a tarp with some medicines under it. And many camps don’t even have that. I also suspect (thank you RAND for you honesty) that shit is not going to happen ‘ground-up’ as everyone keeps promising. It’ll look ground-up. It’ll be touted as ground-up, but it’s just going to be a bunch more of the usual paternalistic, economistic, top-down heavy-handed (though velvetly gloved) neliberal / Washington consensus / wish-we-were-kinder-capitalism kind of “development” that’s been flung around like monkey poo for the last 50 years.
I realize i sound bitter. I am bitter. I’m frustrated. I can’t even write my research proposal without bursting into tears every five minutes – deep, soul-wrenching sobs at the utter imbalance of it all. Then i feel like an ass because i’m sitting in at my desk in my apartment on my computer.
But i still need to answer the question: what will my research questions do?
Spatialize health understandings of health citizenship. Why? Why does anyone care? It’s uneven. I know that. I’ve said that. So why do i have to go prove it. Everyone knows it. Wait! there’s hypothesis #1: the camps and the meeting out of the health service delivery has created uneven geographies of health enclaving that lead to differently articulated understandings of health citizenship.
But what does this matter to the rebuilding effort? How does it relate? Rebuilding will happen in multiple ways. There will be the heavy-handed obvious rebuilding (e.g., Clinton’s hospital), the less obvious, less heavy ways (Pape’s model city) and there will be…? what? and how does an articulation of health citizenship actually help to understand this?
The discourses of the government and the organizing bodies to mobilize people will speak directly back to how people speak of their own health citizenship. By bringing these two articulations into conversation with each other, we can examine … examine … examine … what?! What, exactly?! I’ve been told not to speak of the disjuncture. I’ve been told not to point out that it’s probably actually as big a mess as the tweets coming out of Haiti would have me believe. So what?
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