PhD Project 2016 - 2020: Medical travel facilitation between Oman and India: Articulating spaces, creating smoothness and negotiating ethical complexities
My thesis is set in the context of transnational healthcare and looks at medical travel from Oman to India with a specific focus on practices of medical travel facilitation. This offers a route into better understanding how these practices contribute to making transnational healthcare, and care, possible, feasible and possibly ‘good enough’ for patients to consider. Working through different dimensions of medical travel facilitation in conversation with recent work on care in Science and Technology Studies and the ethics of care, I explore three interrelated ways in which these practices are integral to transnational healthcare: first, for how they articulate spaces and spatialities, second, for the way they make transnational healthcare ‘smooth’ and third, for how they negotiate ethical complexities.
The empirically informed theorisation of the relationships between facilitation and care as encountered in ethnographic fieldwork in Oman and India contributes to current debates about (transnational) configurations of care in the fields of ethics, policy, and Science and Technology Studies in geography and beyond.