Browsing by Author "Vale, Elizabeth"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemOpen Access'I know this person. Why must I go to him?' Techniques of Authority Among Community Health Workers in Cape Town(2012) Vale, ElizabethThis paper forms part of a larger research project that explores how community health workers negotiate between the prescribed 'manual' for care and the realities of their field - re-appropriating prescriptions of public health policy through the micro-politics of everyday practice. Crucial to this question is how community health workers are able to disseminate the care manual authoritatively, despite their own authority being inherently unstable. This paper will discuss how careworkers negotiate authority in social and occupational contexts that regularly and powerfully undermine it. What tools, both discursive and otherwise, are at their disposal as they attempt to assert their authority as carers and measure up to those to whose authority they must submit? The paper shows that careworkers draw on a vast repertoire of discourses and performances in order to invoke, bargain for and appease authority. These series of improvisations are key to their survival on the job and necessitated by a care manual that is often impervious to social context.
- ItemOpen Access'Looking for greener pastures': Locating Care in the Life Histories of Community Health Workers(2012) Vale, ElizabethThe question of who does the caring and why is fundamental to understanding the dynamic practice of AIDS care in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper explores motivations to enter carework as part of the life narratives of fifteen young South Africans - all pursuing 'the good life' in a country where high emancipatory expectations clash with tremendous structural constraints. Drawing on over ten hours of interview data focusing primarily on respondents' life stories, the paper explores the moment of entering carework as part of a largely improvisatory set of tactics to 'get by' and hopefully 'move up' in post- apartheid South Africa. For some, becoming a carer felt like a well-considered choice, but for most it was an opportunistic ad hoc move amidst a range of other contingencies in their daily lives.
- ItemOpen Access'You must make a plan or [...] some story': Community Health Workers' Re- appropriation of the Care Manual(2012) Vale, ElizabethThis paper investigates community health workers' negotiation between the prescribed 'manual' for care and the lived realities of their field, exploring how standards of public health are re-appropriated through the micro-politics of everyday practice. What inventiveness, agency and tactical maneuvers are woven between abstract ideals and situational demands and what are the implications for our understanding of carework? The paper shows community health work, as a model for care, to be complex and demanding � a composite of practices prescribed by a range of institutions with diverging interests. To add to this, this onerous care manual is expected to be delivered by a cadre of lay health workers positioned at the interface between communities and clinics - with minimal training, limited resources and little authority. Within this demanding occupational terrain, careworkers have crafted space for agency and tactics. Through a series of improvisations, respondents mediate between the often-incongruent demands of patients, employers, funders and state policy, whilst also negotiating their own self-care and aspirations for upward mobility. In a policy context that has sought to standardise, systematise and regulate carework, this practice is contrastingly inventive and adaptive. The makeshift, unplanned and chancy nature of carework is often far from its original design, calling into question how the success of this model should be understood.