Contingent Citizens

Reviews / Votes

"Elizabeth Hull's prize-winning study, is a rich and empathic study of nurses' experiences in Bethesda Hospital in KZN from the 1930s to the present, and a wide-ranging account of their professionalization and politicization in years of dramatic political and social change. Careful research traces the complex relationship between the state, missions, nurses and doctors, revealing the contradictions inherent in the changing nature of professionalism, while a brilliant coda illuminates the more theoretical aspects of her study. - Shula Marks, SOAS, UK

Elizabeth Hull's rich and insightful ethnography of a rural hospital shows how nurses confronted apartheid's racial glass ceiling only to face a labyrinth of paperwork and patients' new rights in the democratic era. As South Africa plans a universal health system, policy makers and scholars inside and outside the country should read this pathbreaking book to recognize how health workers make projects of care through mundane routines and moral codes of professionalism. - Mark Hunter, University of Toronto, Canada

Hospitals and health care providers are often overlooked when scholars examine the forces that shape societies. Not only does Hull's book provide a broad analysis of nurses' experiences, it reminds us how crucial these actors and their spaces are in understanding the transition to post-apartheid South Africa - including significant changes in health care as well as the dynamics of a professional black middle-class. - Leslie Anne Hadfield, Brigham Young University, USA"