Oppression and caring : a feminist ethnography of working to improve patient care in Ethiopia

Abstract

This dissertation presents a feminist ethnography of working for improved patient care in a hospital in Ethiopia. Its principal focus is on caring (and the absence of it), and how social, cultural and historical issues relating to oppression, gender and power influence caring. It is a self-reflexive account of a white, Irish woman and nurse, and her relationships with “others” in a Third World context. The study is contextualised within a process of the dynamic of Western aid to Third World countries. Data were obtained from ethnographic fieldwork “first hand” encounters, including participant observation and interviews, which occurred over a twelve-month period, from March 1996 to March 1997. Data from the field were recorded in fieldnotes and this study demonstrates how the dynamics of being in the field and recording fieldnotes have a synergistic property. Data analysis involved drawing on critical incidents, that is particular powerful episodes from the field, where I engaged in a narrow, microscopic focus on details to find meaning both from the larger frame of theoretical principles of gender, power, oppression and caring, and from a framework of understanding that is essentially my own biography.