Bringing relational comparison into development studies: Global health volunteers’ experiences of Sierra Leone

Brooks, Andrew; Herrick, Clare

doi:10.1177/1464993418822857

Cited by 11 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…With most economies across sub-Saharan Africa entwined into the global economic system, there was no yielding to capital's hold and poor countries resorted to unrestrained borrowing as they bought into the modernisation myth (Corbridge and Thrift 1994). Countries like Zambia committed to new loans in support for consumption, against the background of declining export commodities prices, and exposed themselves to interest payments that would prove unsustainable-lending that consolidated the US control of the international monetary system (Brooks 2017;Ferguson 1999;Panitch and Gindin 2004). Control, wrought through consent and coercion, extended to other capitalist economies, where American penetration "determined that inter-state tensions were limited to renegotiating the terms of the imperial relationship, not questioning its essence" (Panitch and Gindin 2004:59).…”

Section: Debt Crises In Zambia the 1980smentioning

confidence: 99%

Africa's Next Debt Crisis: A Relational Comparison of Chinese and Western Lending to Zambia

Gort

Brooks

2023

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Africa faces a new debt crisis fuelled by Chinese and Western lending. At the forefront is Zambia, which defaulted on Eurobond payments in 2020. The article sets the developing Africa‐wide crisis within a relational comparison that draws the current Zambian moment together with the financial collapse of the 1980s. By placing Chinese lending within a comparative global frame, we make three contributions. First, Zambia provides a “spatial fix” for capital, but such African borrowing is not passive and shapes hegemonic struggles between China and the US. Thus secondly, Africa's relationship with debt is co‐constituent in the remaking of the global economy, as signalled by the contested execution and interpretation of development‐as‐modernisation. Finally, a relational comparison of the two debt crises demonstrates that global capitalist hegemony is, partly, engineered by the consent and coercion of African governments, yet the human costs of borrowing are fully borne by the world's poorest.

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Section: Debt Crises In Zambia the 1980smentioning

confidence: 99%

Africa's Next Debt Crisis: A Relational Comparison of Chinese and Western Lending to Zambia

Gort

Brooks

2023

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“…Here, meanings and significance change as different people move through space. Importantly, the infrastructure of global heath that sustains these relational hierarchies (Brooks & Herrick, 2019), saturated as it is with 'geographical imaginaries' (Herrick & Reubi, 2017), tends to 'disappear' and 'fade into the woodwork', except at moments when it 'breaks down' (Bowker & Star, 1999, p. 34). The growing literature on decolonising global health (Hirsch, 2020;Pai, 2021) suggests that humanitarian emergencies such as Ebola and now COVID-19 have enabled engagement with and anger over the infrastructures that feed off and sustain inequality.…”

Section: Covid -19 and The Changing Face Of Humanitarianismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanitarian inversions: COVID‐19 as crisis

Herrick

Kelly

Soulard

2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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COVID‐19 is a multi‐spectral crisis that has added an acute layer over a panoply of complex emergencies across the world. In the process, it has not only exposed actually‐existing emergencies, but also exacerbated them as the global gaze has turned inward. As a crisis, COVID‐19 straddles and challenges the boundaries between humanitarianism, development and global health – the frames and categories through which emergencies are so often understood and intervened upon. Reflection on these fundamental categories is, we argue, an important geographical endeavour. Drawing on Geoffrey Bowker’s analytical lens of the ‘infrastructural inversion’, we explore how humanitarianism has been upended by Covid‐19 along two axes that are of core concern to geographers: (1) the spatial; and (2) the temporal. We first contextualise current debates on the humanitarian endeavour and its future within recent geographical research. We then set out the complex structure by which COVID‐19 has been both imagined and intervened upon as a humanitarian emergency. In so doing, we then pave the way for a deeper empirical analysis of the spatial and temporal inversions that have been brought forth by COVID‐19. The paper concludes by examining the conceptual value of the ‘inversion’ in developing geographical research agendas better attuned to the increasing porosity of humanitarianism, development and global health.

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“…Present-day Connaught has an ambiguous reputation as the country's 'numberone hospital' (as the main referral and teaching hospital), but this reputation coexists with a more negative public perception of Connaught as 'the place you go to die' (Walsh and Johnson 2018). The hospital receives limited commodities from the government and stock-outs of medicines and other essential supplies are common (Brooks and Herrick 2019). The hospital building itself reveals its years of neglect; brown and white paint peels from the thick brick walls and the pharmacy's shelves are often empty.…”

Section: Infrastructural Instability and The Institutional Value Of The Laboratorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructural Instability, Value, and Laboratory Work in a Public Hospital in Sierra Leone

Vernooij¹

2021

MAT

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This research article examines the relationship between infrastructural instability and laboratory work in a public referral hospital in Sierra Leone. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside the hospital’s wards and clinical laboratory, I show how attending to infrastructure and materiality (i.e., laboratory spaces, diagnostic equipment, and supply chains) provides insight into the different kinds of value that laboratory work holds for laboratory technicians, clinicians, hospital administrators, and international donors. Through the case study of a newly arrived non-functioning diagnostic instrument, I reveal the institutional undervaluing of both the laboratory and the improvisation work performed by lab technicians to stabilise unstable equipment. Infrastructural instability in the laboratory enables the generation of new kinds of value, including economic and social value for laboratory technicians themselves, but undermines the clinical value of laboratory tests for clinicians and patients. By discussing the everyday practices, challenges, and meanings of laboratory work in a context of infrastructural instability, I aim to draw attention to the clinical laboratory space as a field site worthy of (more) anthropological inquiry and health systems research and contribute new insights about improvisation, instability, and diagnostic value creation in under-resourced settings.

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Bringing relational comparison into development studies: Global health volunteers’ experiences of Sierra Leone

Cited by 11 publications

References 42 publications

Africa's Next Debt Crisis: A Relational Comparison of Chinese and Western Lending to Zambia

Africa's Next Debt Crisis: A Relational Comparison of Chinese and Western Lending to Zambia

Humanitarian inversions: COVID‐19 as crisis

Infrastructural Instability, Value, and Laboratory Work in a Public Hospital in Sierra Leone

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