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.