Rania Kassab Swiss, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Richmond, has been awarded the 2022 Book Prize by the Association for Middle East Childhood and Youth Studies for her book Paradox of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt.
In Caring for Contradictions, Kassab Sweis examines how some of the world’s largest aid organizations care for vulnerable children in Egypt, focusing medical efforts with street children and village girls out of school . Her in-depth study reveals how global medical aid can create new social inequalities in the lives of children.
“Every year, billions of dollars are spent on global humanitarian health initiatives, and these efforts aim to provide care for suffering bodies, especially troubled children living in poverty,” Swiss said. “But just as global medical aid can often overlook local economic and political systems that are suffering, it can also inadvertently exacerbate conditions that hurt children and undermine those providing local aid.”
AMECYS noted that in Paradox of Care Kassab Swiss “convincingly shows the active agency of vulnerable children within the world of adults and tells us their voice.”
The award committee also stated that Kassab Sweis demonstrated “an ability to combine academic rigor with a warm, compassionate approach to defenseless children”.
The prize committee said, “While Kassab Sweis’s ethnographic research focuses on at-risk children in Egypt, it is also relevant to some allied fields, such as gender studies, criminology and studies related to global inequalities and medical humanitarianism.”
Swiss’s research interests include medical anthropology, global health and humanitarian studies, international gender and feminist theory, and the Middle East and North Africa. Sweis is currently developing a second book project that focuses on medical humanitarianism in the Syrian Civil War, with a special emphasis on how local healthcare workers navigate extreme conditions while providing life-saving care.
News Source – richmond.edu