Doctoral Dissertation Research: Education and Gendered Dilemmas in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

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New York University doctoral student Barbara A. Andersen, supervised by Dr. Rayna Rapp, will investigate the local implementation and cultural mediation of western professional standards in non-western situations. The focus of the resarch will be nursing education. The research will be carried out as an ethnographic study in the provincial town of Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. The researcher will employ of mix of social science methodologies, including participant-observation, life history interviews and analysis of discourse practices in educational and clinical settings. The investigator's focal research questions are: 1) How do nurses learn to engage with the universal categories of biomedicine and the local context of changing gender relations? 2) How does the classification of nursing as "women's work" affect nurses' scientific and ethical frameworks? 3) Does the gendering of nursing affect interactions with patients in clinical settings, and if so, how?Findings from this research will advance knowledge in cultural anthropology and allied disciplines by bringing theories of gender and cultural change, in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere, to bear on questions about the role of scientific and medical training in processes of social transformation. By linking the political economy of health to professional practices, this research will enhance knowledge of how health care systems interact with the moral and cultural values of the populations they serve. Nurses are front-line workers managing women's health concerns in many parts of the developing world, so the results of this research will be relevant to other countries in which gender roles are changing rapidly. This project supports the training of a social scientist.