Doctoral Dissertation Research: "Healing Hearts and Training Minds" in El Salvador: Pediatric Heart Surgery Missions and Globally Circulating Biotechnologies

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Medical missions have long addressed the health needs of the world's most vulnerable populations. Typically, volunteer teams travel to resource-poor countries on a short-term basis to treat common ailments, promote health and attend to other primary care needs. A recent trend in medical humanitarian aid, however, emphasizes the movement of technologically-sophisticated, state-of-the-art care from rich to poor countries. Pediatric heart surgery missions exemplify this trend, thus defining a new context where biotechnologies and associated knowledge circulate globally. This study investigates the social and medical ramifications of this emergent form of technology transfer in contexts where surgeons from the United States make visits to El Salvador to repair damaged pediatric hearts. The research examines how heart surgeries are performed in resource-poor settings; how humanitarian medicine is imagined and experienced by providers and recipients of care; and the long-term consequences of efforts to treat patients, train physicians and bring in new supplies. The researcher will conduct 14 months of ethnographic field research in two countries (the United States and El Salvador) to examine the practices, significance and long-term effects of pediatric heart surgery missions in El Salvador. By focusing on the practices, meanings and grounded impacts of pediatric heart surgery missions, this study expands or refines theories related to bodies and biotechnologies: namely, bodies as not things-in-themselves but objects made and unmade through practice (namely, surgical intervention) and biotechnologies as global flows that are imagined, embraced and reworked in local settings. In addition, this study will contribute to knowledge on humanitarian science aid more generally. The project will have broad impact by providing insight into the political and cultural effects of knowledge transfer in global settings. Although this project focuses on one particular technology, research findings will offer insight into the social science study of technology transfer more broadly. Research findings will be shared at academic conferences and academic publications as well as through presentations and publications geared toward health care professionals.