New York University doctoral student Barbara A. Andersen, supervised by Dr. Rayna Rapp, will investigate the local implementation and cultural mediation of western professional standards in non-western situations. The focus of the resarch will be nursing education. The research will be carried out as an ethnographic study in the provincial town of Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. The researcher will employ of mix of social science methodologies, including participant-observation, life history interviews and analysis of discourse practices in educational and clinical settings. The investigator's focal research questions are: 1) How do nurses learn to engage with the universal categories of biomedicine and the local context of changing gender relations? 2) How does the classification of nursing as "women's work" affect nurses' scientific and ethical frameworks? 3) Does the gendering of nursing affect interactions with patients in clinical settings, and if so, how?
Findings from this research will advance knowledge in cultural anthropology and allied disciplines by bringing theories of gender and cultural change, in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere, to bear on questions about the role of scientific and medical training in processes of social transformation. By linking the political economy of health to professional practices, this research will enhance knowledge of how health care systems interact with the moral and cultural values of the populations they serve. Nurses are front-line workers managing women's health concerns in many parts of the developing world, so the results of this research will be relevant to other countries in which gender roles are changing rapidly. This project supports the training of a social scientist.
This research examines how nursing education in Papua New Guinea (PNG) prepares graduates for the dilemmas of working as health professionals under conditions of heightened economic inequality and gender violence. The Co-PI conducted fieldwork from December 2010 until June 2012 in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, conducting participant-observation in classrooms, rural practicum sites, and clinics, and interviewing 56 nursing students of both genders. While data analysis is still ongoing, preliminary findings are as follows: nurses, as the primary health care providers in both rural and urban settings in this rapidly urbanizing nation, occupy a crucial position for understanding current social transformations. As members of the country's tiny educated middle class, nurses face an often contradictory position in their own careers: they have opportunities for social mobility and financial independence well beyond much of the population. They are bound by their own profession's code of ethics to distribute care impartially, and yet they are also under pressure to give preferential treatment to relatives and clan members. The dissertation will describe how nurses are trained to construct PNG's "rural" people as culturally other, and what the consequences of these constructions are for their own ethical values and practices. This research advances knowledge in cultural anthropology by bringing scholarship on gender and class in Papua New Guinea to bear on questions about the role of scientific and medical expertise in processes of social change. More broadly, the project contributes to reevaluations of the role of cultural processes in the biosciences, by focusing on how local systems of meaning and value interface with ostensibly neutral "global" scientific practices. In addition to the Co-PI's dissertation, to be completed by May 2014, this research has produced three forthcoming conference papers and a peer-reviewed article currently under review. This research has contributed to the training of a social scientist.
