Contingent Citizens Professional Aspiration in a South African Hospital [Hardcover]

Contingent Citizensexamines the ambiguous state of South Africa's public sector workers and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It takes us inside an ethnography of the professional ethic of nurses in a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, shaped by a deep history of mission medicine and changing forms of new public management. Liberal democratic principles of 'transparency', 'decentralization' and 'rights', though promising freedom from control, often generate fear and insecurity instead. But despite the pressures they face, Elizabeth Hull shows that nurses draw on a range of practices from international migration to new religious movements, to assert new forms of citizenship.

Focusing an anthropological lens on 'professionalism', Hull explores the major fault lines of South Africa's fragmented social landscape  class, gender, race, and religion  to make an important contribution to the study of class formation and citizenship. This prize-winning monograph will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, development studies, sociology and global public health.

List of Figures, Tables and Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
About the book

1. Geographies of Autonomy
2. The Limits of Professionalism
3. Autonomy and Control from Mission to State
4. Accountability, Hierarchy and Care
5. The Sickness of Democracy
6. Aspiration beyond Professionalism

Conclusion
References