Research in Tanzania

My ethnographic research in Tanzania spans two projects, research for which wrapped up in 2017.

Foreign volunteers observe a surgery at a government hospital in Tanzania

The first project explored the for-profit international volunteering industry, focusing on volunteerism in under-resourced health facilities.

Since the mid-2000s, “voluntourism”—or short-term volunteering in low and middle income countries—has emerged as an international travel trend, and simultaneously as the subject of heated popular and academic debate. Among aspiring health professionals, placements in health facilities in the so-called global South are particularly attractive. In popular and academic debates on hospital voluntourism, one side lauds the perceived positive impact of international volunteers on hosting institutions; the other highlights ethical conundrums and possible harms, some going so far as to depict student volunteers as neocolonial narcissists benefiting more from the experience than hosting communities do. Drawing on online research and in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania from 2008-2017, my book in progress, The Business of Good Intentions: Reframing the Global Health Volunteering Debate leaves behind polarizing narratives of heroes and villains and instead focuses on the systematic drivers and wider implications of voluntourism in medical settings. Structurally, the book travels from the most intimate experiences of the author, to participant observation and interviews with volunteers and health workers in Tanzania, to the internet for an examination of companies’ visual and discursive framing of countries and hospital volunteer placements for students. In doing so, this book considers how history and economics collude in the for-profit voluntourism industry to seemingly render moral the familiar yet unmarked racialized tropes informing imaginaries of doing good elsewhere. Other publications from this project can be found in Global Public Health, and in the edited volume Volunteer Economies, edited by Ruth Prince and Hannah Brown, published by James Currey.

Canadian NGO representatives follow a Tanzanian woman from the clinic to a shop to observe and photograph her while she purchases a mosquito net—a project sponsored in part by their organization.

The second project was a longitudinal ethnographic investigation of health institutions’ transformations in the wake of health sector reform and externally-funded global health interventions, primarily for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and reproductive health. The project traced how public health facilities have adopted, absorbed, and creatively engaged with the constraints and opportunities presented by donor-funded and government-prioritized initiatives over the past twenty years. This research extended my original 11 month dissertation research to explore how institutions attempt to create public private partnerships, or PPPs, as well as their own, institutionally-owned private businesses, in order to tackle pressing infrastructural and capacity shortages in the absence of sufficient government and donor support. This study of the remaking of public health sectors through market logics and transnational and state intervention explored the broader effects of scarcity, narrow health targets, and even narrower budgets on opportunities and constraints health sectors face in Tanzania, and beyond. Portions of this project have been published in Social Science and Medicine, Africa, Critical Public Health, Medical Anthropology, and Space and Culture.

Please see the Publications page for other publications from this research.

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