Place, Personhood and Precarity: Immigration and the Landscape of Care in Rural America

photo of Thurka Sangaramoorthy

Growing numbers of immigrants work and live in rural, geographically isolated areas throughout the United States — places without previously settled immigrant populations. Rapid immigration to such areas already struggling with poverty, weak public infrastructures and high concentrations of uninsured residents has given way to an increasingly precarious landscape of care. In this talk, presented by the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and its Center for Global Health, Associate Professor Thurka Sangaramoorthy will discuss how providers and immigrants engage in informal transactions as a means to negotiate care within a landscape constituted by issues related to rural precarity and against the backdrop of growing political uncertainties related to immigration and health care reform. She argues that such transactions work to produce new alignments of social relations and new values of place and personhood. She also suggests that they engender a particular kind of relationship between informal and moral economies.

About the Speaker

Thurka Sangaramoorthy is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland. She is a cultural anthropologist with specialization in medical anthropology and epidemiology. Her research and teaching interests include global health and development, infectious disease epidemics, social studies of science, health policy and governance, and critical studies of racialization. Her work broadly is concerned with linking theories and forms of subjectivity with economies and practices of care and governance. She has worked at this intersection on diverse topics, including HIV, immigrant health and environmental risk in various contexts including the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa.
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