[Introduction to] Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt.

Authors

Rania Kassab Sweis, University of RichmondFollow

Files

Description

Each year, billions of dollars are spent on global humanitarian health initiatives. These efforts are intended to care for suffering bodies, especially those of distressed children living in poverty. But as global medical aid can often overlook the local economic and political systems that cause bodily suffering, it can also unintentionally prolong the very conditions that hurt children and undermine local aid givers. Investigating medical humanitarian encounters in Egypt, Paradoxes of Care illustrates how child aid recipients and local aid experts grapple with global aid's shortcomings and its paradoxical outcomes.

Rania Kassab Sweis examines how some of the world's largest aid organizations care for vulnerable children in Egypt, focusing on medical efforts with street children and out-of-school village girls. Her in-depth ethnographic study reveals how global medical aid fails to "save" these children according to its stated aims, and often maintains—or produces new—social disparities in children's lives. Foregrounding vulnerable children's responses to medical aid, Sweis moves past the unquestioned benevolence of global health to demonstrate how children must manage their own bodies and lives in the absence of adult care. With this book, she challenges readers to engage with the question of what medical caregivers and donors alike gain from such global humanitarian transactions.

ISBN

9781503628649

Publication Date

2021

Publisher

Stanford University Press

City

Redwood City

DOI

10.1515/9781503628649

Keywords

Global health, children, Egypt, Anthropology, Medical humanitarians, Gender, International aid, Medical aid

Disciplines

Asian Studies | Growth and Development | International and Area Studies | International Economics | Political Science | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Find this in our library

10.1515/9781503628649

Recommended Citation

Sweis, Rania Kassab. Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2021.