Organizer: Center for Khmer Studies
Type/Location: Virtual
Description:
Join the Center for Khmer Studies for a talk by Derek Richardson, PhD Candidate in Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington, who will discuss his ethnography of three NGOs in Cambodia that provide healthcare services and rely on foreign volunteer healthcare professionals to assist with treating patients and training local staff. Sokro Suong, PhD student at National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilization (INALCO) and Executive Director of Yosothor, will moderate the discussion.
Professional work is increasingly transnational in scope, as professionals who are trained and credentialed in one country often apply their expertise and skills in other countries. Medicine is no exception, especially in Cambodia where many healthcare professionals travel from the Global North to volunteer their expertise and treat Khmer patients in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). My research investigates the transnational movement of volunteer healthcare professionals from the Global North to NGOs in Cambodia by asking, “How do transnational healthcare professionals, and the organizations in which they work, manage the application of medical expertise in new settings?” I answer this question through a comparative ethnography of three NGOs in Cambodia that provide healthcare services and rely on foreign volunteer healthcare professionals to assist with treating patients and training local staff. I find that although foreign volunteer healthcare professionals perceive their medical expertise as universally applicable and readily transportable to Cambodian NGOs, their unfamiliarity with NGOs’ structures, staff, and patients requires them to adopt various impression management strategies to successfully perform their roles as medical experts. How such impression management unfolds depends on a multitude of factors that variously enable or constrain the execution of their professional duties.
About the Speaker:
Derek Richardson is a sixth-year sociology PhD candidate at Indiana University Bloomington in the United States. He spent 16 months in Cambodia at three nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provide healthcare services conducting ethnographic observations and interviews for his dissertation titled “Foreign Experts, Local Problems: Tracing the Transnational Movement and Application of Medical Expertise in Cambodian Nongovernmental Organizations.” His dissertation examines how foreign volunteer healthcare professionals import and adapt medical expertise from the Global North when working alongside Khmer healthcare professionals and treating Khmer patients.
About the Moderator:
Sokro Suong was graduated in 2015 from the Faculty of Archaeology, Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA), Phnom Penh. In 2017, he got a Master’s degree in Human and Social Sciences from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilization (INALCO) in Paris. Currently, he is pursuing his doctoral degree in historical anthropology at INALCO. His research topic is Historical anthropology of therapeutic practices within a Buddhist royalty: the case of the Khmer kingdom (late 15th century-early 21st century). He is currently the Executive Director of Yosothor organization and a lecturer of Cambodian history and old-Khmer epigraphy at the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA).
Registration:
To attend the event online, please register here.