Paper details

Paper authors	Christine Cassar
In panel on	The Politics of Difference in Humanitarian Practice
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

The development of aid practice on a personal and professional level is a process hewn of individual, organizational and sectoral norms. Whilst professional identity develops through technical knowledge (in the case of this study – medical technical knowledge) and through ongoing engagement practicing those skills in international public health, global health or humanitarian/development health, it also throws practitioners (both ‘expat’ and ‘local’) into established roles and hierarchies.

This research delves into aid workers’ motivations and practices, looking at how medical professionals use technical and clinical skills to focus on human need, making efforts to remain separate from hierarchies of national origin, race and gender. Yet, whilst amongst those interviewed, at individual level a career in healthcare and a career in aid are both inspired by a desire to help those most in need, and to achieve global professional cosmopolitanism, progressing professionally then requires a shift away from the same clinical practice into the complex folds of organizational global hierarchies.

The presentation uses three case studies from research participants to consider how under- and over-lying identities of medical professionals within the sector manage and manipulate the (de)colonial nature of aid, intertwining the deploying and working through the dichotomies of local-global, humanitarian-development, professional-voluntary, headquarters-field.

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