Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 6B: The Social and Political Contexts of Health (1)
Chair: Robert Murphy

A Body Worth Defending: “Immunity” and the Bio-Politics of Bio-Medicine
Ed Cohen
Women's and Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, United States of America

This paper explores why, at the end of the 19th century, a 2000 year old juridico-political concept, “immunity,” could be used to describe a newly identified organismic function, “self defense,” a concept which itself has a significant juridical and political history. My basic questions are: how did it begin to make sense in the 1880s and 1890s to imagine that fundamental organismic activities could be described in terms of legal and political frameworks and what consequences has this importation of politics and law into bio-science had for the practice, politics and ethics of health care. This paper argues that immunity's apotheosis as a bio-medical truth incorporated a complex set of political assumptions about personhood and collectivity, about nature and culture, about illness and health, which then got naturalized as forms of explanation though the unreflective mapping of law and politics into the human body itself. A work of genealogical inquiry, the paper seeks to elucidate this complexity by unpacking and elaborating the some of concepts and assumptions on which the biological appropriation of immunity leans. It tries to understand what made the politico-juridco-medico hybrid “immunity” not just thinkable, but indeed the basis for a profound reimagination of human-ness per se. A concluding meditation on the politics of AIDS opens the questions that the paper asks outward to the current moment in which once again the political effects of an incurable infectious disease have rendered the bio-politics of the bio-medical imagination palpable. In sum, the paper's primary aim is to make us more aware of the ways that bio-medicine functions not only as a curative research project but also as a politics and an ethics by other means.

Recruitment of African Nurses in the UK
Gloria Likupe*, Laurie Lynn Kelly* and Joyce Abonyo**
* University of Hull, United Kingdom
**Egerton College, Kenya

The international recruitment of nurses is a major issue, with health, public policy and ethical ramifications. The 2001 United Kingdom Code of Practice on International Recruitment of Nurses prohibited the active recruitment of nurses from developing countries with nursing shortages of their own. Studies commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing indicate that the United Kingdom continues to recruit nurses from Africa . Private agencies and individual contacts have become more common methods of recruitment. Unlike the NHS, the Code of Practice does not cover private agencies. Africa ’s loss of nurses is problematic, especially now, when the greatest social and economic burden facing sub-Saharan Africa , HIV-AIDS, has increased the need for nurses.
Little is known about the experience of nurses with recruitment agencies, or recruited by private contacts, and their transition from African countries to the UK .
Using mainly qualitative methods, the paper will critically assess why African nurses leave their home countries to work in the UK , what are their expectations of the work and what are the realities. The paper will also explore the ethical issues of immigration from personal, professional and international perspectives.
This study will also explore how the United Kingdom may be able to support developing countries to retain their nurses.

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