Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses micro-politics of moral responsibility, humanitarian emotion and professional recognition in medical South-South cooperation by introducing categories such as race, nationality and class into the discussion of moral economies in international medical work and humanitarian action.

Paper long abstract:

The vast international mobility of health professions are integral part of emerging Western aid industries as well as current South-North, respectively East-West, labor migration of skilled workers. As Fassin, Redfield, Connell and others showed, all these dynamics are subject to moral economies, which also comprise the micro-level of local actors and their constant negotiations between altruistic conformant, professional positioning and economic needs. Yet, these discussions turn out to be preponderantly biased, centering on altruistic challenges of "helpers" from the North (while their professional recognition is hardly questioned), whereas focusing rather more on economic needs of "workers" from the South (and on the subjection of their professionalism to doubt or even disqualification). South-South mobilities of health workers did rarely enter these discussions so far, even less the moral economies involved. The paper addresses this gap by introducing a case study of Cuban health professionals working in urban peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, being part of international health cooperation between both countries in order to improve the precarious Brazilian public health sector. I will focus on the multilayered local negotiations taking place around moral responsibility, humanitarian emotion and professional recognition in this specific South-South-cooperation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analyses, I will discuss how these local negotiations are intimately shaped by wider social imaginaries on the authority of giving, of medical professionalism and of moral reason, comprising categories such as race, nationality and class in medical work and humanitarian action.