Transnational Mobility and Global Health spotlights the powerful and dynamic intersections of human movement and health. The book explores the interacting political, social, economic, and cultural determinants of migrant health, proposing specific and innovative ways to enhance global health in an age of transnational mobility.
Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa—and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.
Transnational Mobility and Global Health spotlights the powerful and dynamic intersections of human movement, inequality, and health. The book explores the interacting political, economic, social, cultural, and climatic drivers of health and migration, proposing innovative ways to enhance global health and care provision in an era of transnational mobility. As health security continues to rise up the agenda in international politics, the book also analyses the political determinants of health and migration. Within the framework of key drivers of unequal mobilities, this book treats interconnected health and migration themes not covered elsewhere under one cover: health tourism, conflict-induced and other vulnerable-population movements, humanitarian crises, human rights, the health-development linkage, migrant health-care, and health-competency education. The book also considers global health vulnerabilities in the wake of climate change, and the biomedical, ethical, and governance challenges of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Finally, the book suggests ways of evaluating mobility-influenced health outcomes and equity impacts, and explores how the global circulation of health expertise could help to rectify care-provider shortages. The challenges to global health considered in this book are only likely to become more intense as the 21st-Century surge in transnational migration continues. Readers will gain interdisciplinary appreciation for the relevance of health for migration and of migration for global health. Researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers interested in individual and population health, sustainable development, and migration studies will find this book a useful and inspiring guide to contemporary global challenges.
Since the late 1990s, Asian nations have increasingly encouraged, facilitated, or demanded the return of emigrants. In this interdisciplinary collection, distinguished scholars from countries around the world explore the changing relations between nation-states and transnational mobility. Taking into account illegally trafficked migrants, deportees, temporary laborers on short-term contracts, and highly skilled émigrés, the contributors argue that the figure of the returnee energizes and redefines nationalism in an era of increasingly fluid and indeterminate national sovereignty. They acknowledge the diversity, complexity, and instability of reverse migration, while emphasizing its discursive, policy, and political significance at a moment when the tensions between state power and transnational subjects are particularly visible. Taken together, the essays foreground Asia as a useful site for rethinking the intersections of migration, sovereignty, and nationalism. Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh
This report describes recent trends in the international migration of doctors and nurses in OECD countries. Over the past decade, the number of doctors and nurses has increased in many OECD countries, and foreign-born and foreign-trained doctors and nurses have contributed to a significant extent. New in-depth analysis of the internationalisation of medical education shows that in some countries (e.g. Israel, Norway, Sweden and the United States) a large and growing number of foreign-trained doctors are people born in these countries who obtained their first medical degree abroad before coming back. The report includes four case studies on the internationalisation of medical education in Europe (France, Ireland, Poland and Romania) as well as a case study on the integration of foreign-trained doctors in Canada.
The long separation of health and International Relations, as distinct academic fields and policy arenas, has now dramatically changed. Health, concerned with the body, mind and spirit, has traditionally focused on disease and infirmity, whilst International Relations has been dominated by concerns of war, peace and security. Since the 1990s, however, the two fields have increasingly overlapped. How can we explain this shift and what are the implications for the future development of both fields? Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee examine four key intersections between health and International Relations today - foreign policy and health diplomacy, health and the global political economy, global health governance and global health security. The explosion of interest in these subjects has, in large part, been due to "real world" concerns - disease outbreaks, antibiotic resistance, counterfeit drugs and other risks to human health amid the spread of globalisation. Yet the authors contend that it is also important to understand how global health has been socially constructed, shaped in theory and practice by particular interests and normative frameworks. This groundbreaking book encourages readers to step back from problem-solving to ask how global health is being problematized in the first place, why certain agendas and issue areas are prioritised, and what determines the potential solutions put forth to address them? The palpable struggle to better understand the health risks facing a globalized world, and to strengthen collective action to deal with them effectively, begins - they argue - with a more reflexive and critical approach to this rapidly emerging subject.
The Seminar on Health and Migration was initiated in recognition of the need to assess the public health implications of increasingly mobile populations, and to integrate health policies into migration management strategies. This publication details the broad range of issues discussed during the seminar including: the use of pre-departure health assessments; the need to address the mental health of migrants; healthcare access for irregular migrants; and the migration of healthcare workers. It also sets out the main challenges and areas for policy reform, such as the need for programme support, local capacity building, information-sharing and communication of best practices.
The first famous transgender person in the United States, Christine Jorgensen, traveled to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery in 1952. Jorgensen became famous during the ascent of postwar dreams about the possibilities for technology to transform humanity and the world. In Mobile Subjects Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives within global health and tourism economies from 1952 to the present. Drawing on an archive of trans memoirs and documentaries as well as ethnographic fieldwork with trans people obtaining gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura maps the uneven use of medical protocols to show how national and regional health care systems and labor economies contribute to and limit transnational mobility. Aizura positions transgender travel as a form of biomedical tourism, examining how understandings of race, gender, and aesthetics shape global cosmetic surgery cultures and how economic and racially stratified marketing and care work create the ideal transgender subject as an implicitly white, global citizen. In so doing, he shows how understandings of travel and mobility depend on the historical architectures of colonialism and contemporary patterns of global consumption and labor.
This book examines the transformations in home lives arising in later life and resulting from global migrations. It provides insight into the ways in which contemporary demographic processes of aging and migration shape the meaning, experience and making of home for those in older age. Chapters explore how home is negotiated in relation to possibilities for return to the "homeland," family networks, aging and health, care cultures and belonging. The book deliberately crosses emerging sub-fields in transnationalism studies by offering case studies on aging labour migrants, retirement migrants, and return migrants, as well as older people affected by the movement of others including family members and migrant care workers. The diversity of people’s experiences of home in later life is fully explored and the impact of social class, gender, and nationality, as well as the corporeal dimensions of older age, are all in evidence.
International medical travel (IMT), people crossing national borders in the pursuit of healthcare, has become a growing phenomenon. With many of the countries currently being promoted as IMT destinations located in the ‘developing’ world, IMT poses a significant challenge to popular assumptions about who provides and receives care since it inverses and diversifies presumed directionalities of care. This book analyses the development of international medical travel in Malaysia, by looking at the benefits and challenges of providing health care to non-Malaysians. It challenges embedded assumptions about the sources, directions and political value of care. The author situates the Malaysian case study material at the fruitful cross-section of a range of literatures on transnational mobility, hospitality, therapeutic landscapes and medical diplomacy to examine their roles in the construction of national identity. The book thus contributes to wider debates that have emerged around the changing character of global health governance, and is of use to students and scholars of Southeast Asian Studies as well as Politics and Health and Social Care.