Global Health: The Debts of Gratitude

Kenworthy, Nora

doi:10.1353/wsq.2014.0026

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…However, for those obligated to expend social capital through gratitude for care, autonomy is eroded. The pernicious effects of a grateful consciousness are discussed specifically in Galvin (2004) and Kenworthy (2014) —these two articles are also allocated to the “care ethics” meta-narrative in which the relationship between gratitude and power relations is elaborated more fully.…”

Section: Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Articles in which acts of charity or generosity are conceptualized metaphorically as gifts fall outside the boundaries of the way we have circumscribed the gift meta-narrative. These articles engage less with the transaction of goods or money and more with the implications of gratitude as a response to a construal of “care-as-gift.” An example is the study by Kenworthy (2014) which argues global health interventions in developing countries can be interpreted as a gift for which gratitude is the obligatory response. She explores how this engenders “new debts, obligations, and forms of peonage for recipients” (p. 83).…”

Section: Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gratitude in Health Care: A Meta-narrative Review

2020

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Research into gratitude as a significant sociological and psychological phenomenon has proliferated in the past two decades. However, there is little consensus on how it should be conceptualized or investigated empirically. We present a meta-narrative review that focuses on gratitude in health care, with an emphasis on research exploring interpersonal experiences in the context of care provision. Six meta-narratives from literatures across the humanities, sciences, and medicine are identified, contextualized, and discussed: gratitude as social capital; gifts; care ethics; benefits of gratitude; gratitude and staff well-being; and gratitude as an indicator of quality of care. Meta-narrative review was a valuable framework for making sense of theoretical antecedents and findings in this developing area of research. We conclude that greater attention needs to be given to what constitutes “evidence” in gratitude research and call for qualitative studies to better understand and shape the role and implications of gratitude in health care.

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Section: Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gratitude in Health Care: A Meta-narrative Review

2020

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“…The notion of gratitude as a pernicious burden and the result of unequal power dynamics have been examined in the context of interactions between social actors from the global North and South. Kenworthy (2014) situates global healthcare initiatives in the post-colonial, neoliberalized political economy which has ravaged the quality of life and health of untold millions. Her fieldwork on various HIV treatment and prevention projects in Lesotho shows these projects are construed as charitable acts from Western countries to their former colonies.…”

Section: Gratitude: a Cross-disciplinary And Anthropological Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Construction of Gratitude in the workplace: Temporary foreign workers employed in health care

Nourpanah

2020

International Migration

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In capitalist societies, workers feel, or feel obliged to feel grateful for having a job. In a world marked by global inequality, migrants from the global South to the North are expected to feel gratitude for their opportunity to move to and live in a first world country. In the case of temporary foreign workers, both these sorts of gratitude come together. The political economy regime governing the conditions of work and cross-border movement for temporary foreign workers employed in health care in Canada engenders feelings of gratefulness from workers towards their employers. Contextualized within a cross-disciplinary study of gratitude as a social construct, this article uses the case of this particular sort of work and migration gratitude to develop knowledge on the nuanced and complex ways in which structures of feeling lead from and loop back into capitalist political economies.

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“…While anthropologists have noted how global health interventions create enclaves of resources through selective investments of medicine, expertise and care in poor countries (Brada, ; Geissler, ; Kenworthy ; Nguyen, ), there were no resources attached to the intervention itself as it appeared to the inhabitants in Moni village in Malawi in 2010. In practice, the focus was on improving the indicator by changing the behaviour of women, using mechanisms echoing instruments of colonial indirect rule (see Eggen, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enforcing ‘Progress’: A Story of an MDG 5 Indicator and Maternal Health in Malawi

Danielsen¹

2017

Development and Change

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Considering the importance of metrics in current systems of global health accountability, this article analyses the dynamics behind a maternal health indicator. To achieve the target of Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG 5) and increase the proportion of births attended by 'skilled health personnel', some districts in Malawi in 2010 introduced information campaigns to promote births in hospitals and a fine to punish mothers who delivered outside of biomedical health institutions. The study is based on ethnographic research in one Malawian village. While many mothers described the ill treatment and bad conditions in maternity wards, most women still started to publicly sanction institutional births. This apparent contradiction can be understood by looking at the positions and motivations of the various actors who participated in the performance of MDG 5 in the village and how their projects became tied to the focus on improving the indicator. Rather than expressing a demand for the existing maternal health services as such, the ethnography suggests that the actors' practices expressed hopes and claims to wider material improvements in a context of inequality. The article highlights dynamics that are concealed if we restrict the analysis to one of biopower, and expands the purview of the study of metrics into the spaces which indicators are intended to represent.

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Global Health: The Debts of Gratitude

Cited by 9 publications

References 31 publications

Gratitude in Health Care: A Meta-narrative Review

Gratitude in Health Care: A Meta-narrative Review

The Construction of Gratitude in the workplace: Temporary foreign workers employed in health care

Enforcing ‘Progress’: A Story of an MDG 5 Indicator and Maternal Health in Malawi

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