Gendering the Burden of Care
Siobhan and Beth co-published a research article with Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health documenting the gendered impacts of health reform in Belize, Central America.
You can find the article here: Gendering the Burden of Care: Health Reform and the Paradox of Community Participation in Western Belize.
The article presents data from longterm ethnographic field research with rural health providers including Indigenous healers and community nurse aides and reveals that ongoing health reform is weakening front line health care. While providers, the majority women, are palliating the consequences of reform they are also contesting the consumer “logic” of this reform through mutual aid and community care.
Article abstract: Belizean health policy supports a primary health care (PHC) strategy of universal access, community participation, and multisectoral collaboration. The principals of PHC were a key part of Belize's emergent national identity and built on existing community-based health strategies. Ethnographic research in western Belize, however, reveals that ongoing health reform is removing providers from participatory arenas. In this article, we foreground a particular moment in Belizean health history—the rise and demise of multisectoral collaboration—to question what can constitute meaningful community participation in the midst of health reform. Many allied health providers continue to believe in the potential of PHC to alleviate the structural causations of poor health and to invest in PHC despite a lack of state support. This means that providers, the majority women, are palliating the consequences of neoliberal reform; it also means that they provide spaces of contestation to the consumer “logic” of this reform
Beth and Siobhan also published a book (Telling it Straight: Community Narratives and Primary Health Care in Cayo, Belize, New City Community Press) and distributed it back to all research collaborators.