Free Health Clinics, Resistance and the Entanglement of Christianity and Commodified Health Care Delivery

Abstract

Free clinics are an important part of the US health care safety net and their numbers are rising. This article offers a critical analysis of the politics of free health clinics in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It uses the geographies of resistance literature to assess free clinics as a response to the neoliberalization of health care delivery. It underlines the multiple political spaces free clinics occupy as a result of the entanglements of a diverse range of identities and practices within the clinic space. In Milwaukee, the primary entanglement occurs between the progressive Christian identity inspiring the practices of the free clinic's volunteers and the commodified identity of the corporate non-profit health care systems that dominate health care delivery in the city. This research suggests that understanding the transition from oppositional identities, such as progressive Christianity, to resistance is an important next step in constructing more robust responses to neoliberal capitalism and other exploitive social relations.

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

“…Social reproduction is, as Katz (2001b) explains, a necessity. Partly because of its necessity, social reproductive spaces, workers, and institutions are expected to pick up the slack of a disappearing welfare state (Hossler 2012;Katz 2001a;Meehan and Strauss 2015). Social reproduction's necessity facilitates its elasticity.…”

Jobless and Godless: Religious neoliberalism and the project of evangelizing employability in the US The authors contributed equally to the research for and writing of this article.

“…Yet, this scholarship on religious neoliberalism tends to highlight how these ideologies impact the middle- and upper-class, revealing the ways in which it tempers and justifies the pursuit of wealth, materialism and upward mobility (Elisha, 2004; Gerber, 2012; Hackworth, 2012; Zaloom, 2016). Related scholarship similarly focuses upon how charity staff and volunteers are motivated by and deploy various ethical and theological frameworks, often stressing the negotiations amid secular ethics and various religious theologies against overarching neoliberal mandates (Beaumont, 2008; Hossler, 2011; Cloke and Beaumont, 2012; Williams et al., 2012; Williams, 2014; Bolton, 2015). 1 Surprisingly – with the exception of Gowan and Atmore's (2012) work on drug rehab – it has paid far less attention to its targeting, and interpellation, of the poor themselves.…”

Countermovement, Neoliberal Platoon, or Re‐Gifting Depot? Understanding Decommodification in US Food Banks

“…The food banks of the Feeding America network take their lead from the national organization, whose advocacy efforts tend to focus on continuing USDA funding for nutrition programs or endorsing measures such as the Good Samaritan Law that protect donors from liability. Like free health clinics (Hossler :107), food banks seem to prioritize the quantity and quality of services over addressing problems with the market.…”