Soha Bayoumi
Pronouns: she/they
I’m a Teaching Professor in the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities program at Johns Hopkins University. Trained in political theory, political philosophy and intellectual history, I work on the question of justice at the intersection of history, political theory, and science, technology and medicine studies. With a focus on medicine and public health, my research addresses the questions of health and social justice, biomedical ethics, and the medicine-politics nexus, with a geographical focus on the Middle East and a special interest in postcolonial and gender studies.
My research interests focus on medical expertise and how it is deployed in different political contexts. In this framework, I focus on gender and race as important contributors to the fashioning of the medical profession and as key determinants of health and access to medical care. I am currently finishing a book manuscript (co-authored with Sherine Hamdy, UC Irvine, in preparation with Stanford University Press) on the roles played by doctors in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt, and working on another book project on the social roles of doctors in postcolonial Egypt. I am editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and associate editor of the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JIMS).
In addition to teaching courses on the history of medicine and public health, the medical humanities, and gender and sexuality, I have also taught courses in European and American intellectual history, as well as the intellectual history of the modern and contemporary Middle East, with a focus on gender and feminist writing and activism.
I’m a Teaching Professor in the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities program at Johns Hopkins University. Trained in political theory, political philosophy and intellectual history, I work on the question of justice at the intersection of history, political theory, and science, technology and medicine studies. With a focus on medicine and public health, my research addresses the questions of health and social justice, biomedical ethics, and the medicine-politics nexus, with a geographical focus on the Middle East and a special interest in postcolonial and gender studies.
My research interests focus on medical expertise and how it is deployed in different political contexts. In this framework, I focus on gender and race as important contributors to the fashioning of the medical profession and as key determinants of health and access to medical care. I am currently finishing a book manuscript (co-authored with Sherine Hamdy, UC Irvine, in preparation with Stanford University Press) on the roles played by doctors in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt, and working on another book project on the social roles of doctors in postcolonial Egypt. I am editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and associate editor of the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JIMS).
In addition to teaching courses on the history of medicine and public health, the medical humanities, and gender and sexuality, I have also taught courses in European and American intellectual history, as well as the intellectual history of the modern and contemporary Middle East, with a focus on gender and feminist writing and activism.
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a conversation with an audience in January 2019 at Harvard University. It was part of a series of seminars and events hosted by Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality to mark the first year that Harvard hosted the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.
Relying on fieldwork among medics who erected and staffed the field hospitals that tended to injured protesters during the Egyptian uprising of 2011, this paper will investigate the field hospital as a locus for studying the delivery of medicine in a tumultuous political and social context. The paper will focus on the field hospital as a site that afforded physicians spatially and temporally privileged access to o injuries, bodily suffering and loss of life, and thus as a site where medics witnessed first-hand the violence perpetrated by the State against its own citizens. It served as a site of “political conversion” for physicians who were prior to that encounter skeptical towards the value of radical political change. It was a site that, despite its attempts to stay politically neutral, ended up politicizing many of its inhabitants. It is by serving in the hospital that doctors were able to document state violence and lend their “expert testimonies” to discredit the State’s narrative about the political events and its denial of violence. It is a site where appeals to “medical neutrality” were made by doctors, disregarded by the State, and contested by protesters.
With the highest prevalence rate of Hepatitis C globally, Egypt is facing an acute public health crisis that has had political ramifications. The last section of the paper looks at how this crisis has been handled by different political actors following the uprisings: from the military peddling miracle cures to consolidate its political favorability, and the State bureaucracy negotiating a deal with an international pharmaceutical company, to a political party’s recent attempt to offer anti-Hepatitis C drugs for free in its parliamentary elections campaign.
This series invites Boston-area faculty whose research and teaching is Islamic Studies-related (broadly defined) to present their recent work or ongoing research. These informal sessions offer faculty working in a wide range of disciplines an opportunity to share research with colleagues and senior graduate students and to receive constructive feedback. A light supper is served. These seminars are open to faculty, Harvard visiting scholars and researchers and senior graduate students only.
The paper starts by analyzing the current state of public health in Egypt and problematizing the nature of the mobilization to improve it, reflecting on the extent to which the fight for reforming healthcare in Egypt has been formulated as a fight against inequalities/inequities, as opposed to one for guaranteeing human dignity, attaining social justice, fulfilling a human right to health or even stemming corruption and achieving efficiency. Surely, health inequities exist in Egypt, as the epidemiological outcome of differential access to healthcare, both in quantity and in quality, which in turn is the result of the differential enjoyment of other social determinants of health, and as the corollary of wider socioeconomic inequalities. The paper argues that health inequities in Egypt are the outcome of a complex web of authoritarian politics, crony capitalism, corruption, global economic exploitation, healthcare worker brain drain, and domestic injustices. However, as the paper maintains, the dearth of epidemiological studies documenting inequitable health outcomes across geographic, gender and class lines has prevented the fight for health in Egypt from being, first and foremost, conceived of as a fight against inequality, and has favored other frameworks of resistance, such as those of fighting for human dignity, social justice or a right to health.
Relying on interviews with several doctors and a variety of other sources including statements, press releases and news reports, the paper showcases the mobilization of several groups of Egyptian doctors and their efforts, in different capacities, to reform the health system in Egypt, shedding light on some of their achievements and the challenges they have faced. Some of the groups examined include the board of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, “Doctors Without Rights,” The Committee for Defending People’s Right to Health, as well as public campaigns such as “What is More Important than Egyptians’ Health?,” NGOs such as “Tahrir Doctors” and The Association for Health and Environmental Development, and charitable organizations such as “Mercy Doctors.” The paper focuses on two major strikes by doctors in 2012 and 2014.
Relying on a historicized analysis of the role assigned to “experts” by the Egyptian state and public sphere, the paper highlights the paradox and limitations of the role of the “activist-expert.” Since doctors are the face of the healthcare system in Egypt, crumbling and predatory as it may be, their calls for reforming it have often been met with suspicion and skepticism from their patients. They have also often been met with hostility from the State which conveniently blames the deterioration of the healthcare system on doctors’ negligence and greed, as a way to let itself off the hook. On the other hand, and paradoxically, doctors’ expert and insider status and their social capital often act to legitimize their claims about the healthcare system, render them more credible, and validate their appeals to reform it.
The paper proposes the notion of the “organic doctor,” along the lines of Gramsci’s “organic intellectual,” to examine and understand these doctors’ mobilization, not as impartial caregivers, but very often as citizens with grievances themselves who see in their fight for the interests of “the people,” an accomplishment of their socio-professional vocation and a realization of their personal and professional value systems. In this context, the paper attempts to explore the moral, political and socioeconomic realities of “activist” doctors in Egypt, the variety of their experiences, the obstacles they face, and how they construe their mission in the face of skeptical patients and successive regimes that chose to remain deaf to their appeals. The paper concludes that unless stakeholders, viz. patients and ordinary citizens, are included, the fight to reform the Egyptian health system will bear little fruit.
a conversation with an audience in January 2019 at Harvard University. It was part of a series of seminars and events hosted by Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality to mark the first year that Harvard hosted the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.
Relying on fieldwork among medics who erected and staffed the field hospitals that tended to injured protesters during the Egyptian uprising of 2011, this paper will investigate the field hospital as a locus for studying the delivery of medicine in a tumultuous political and social context. The paper will focus on the field hospital as a site that afforded physicians spatially and temporally privileged access to o injuries, bodily suffering and loss of life, and thus as a site where medics witnessed first-hand the violence perpetrated by the State against its own citizens. It served as a site of “political conversion” for physicians who were prior to that encounter skeptical towards the value of radical political change. It was a site that, despite its attempts to stay politically neutral, ended up politicizing many of its inhabitants. It is by serving in the hospital that doctors were able to document state violence and lend their “expert testimonies” to discredit the State’s narrative about the political events and its denial of violence. It is a site where appeals to “medical neutrality” were made by doctors, disregarded by the State, and contested by protesters.
With the highest prevalence rate of Hepatitis C globally, Egypt is facing an acute public health crisis that has had political ramifications. The last section of the paper looks at how this crisis has been handled by different political actors following the uprisings: from the military peddling miracle cures to consolidate its political favorability, and the State bureaucracy negotiating a deal with an international pharmaceutical company, to a political party’s recent attempt to offer anti-Hepatitis C drugs for free in its parliamentary elections campaign.
This series invites Boston-area faculty whose research and teaching is Islamic Studies-related (broadly defined) to present their recent work or ongoing research. These informal sessions offer faculty working in a wide range of disciplines an opportunity to share research with colleagues and senior graduate students and to receive constructive feedback. A light supper is served. These seminars are open to faculty, Harvard visiting scholars and researchers and senior graduate students only.
The paper starts by analyzing the current state of public health in Egypt and problematizing the nature of the mobilization to improve it, reflecting on the extent to which the fight for reforming healthcare in Egypt has been formulated as a fight against inequalities/inequities, as opposed to one for guaranteeing human dignity, attaining social justice, fulfilling a human right to health or even stemming corruption and achieving efficiency. Surely, health inequities exist in Egypt, as the epidemiological outcome of differential access to healthcare, both in quantity and in quality, which in turn is the result of the differential enjoyment of other social determinants of health, and as the corollary of wider socioeconomic inequalities. The paper argues that health inequities in Egypt are the outcome of a complex web of authoritarian politics, crony capitalism, corruption, global economic exploitation, healthcare worker brain drain, and domestic injustices. However, as the paper maintains, the dearth of epidemiological studies documenting inequitable health outcomes across geographic, gender and class lines has prevented the fight for health in Egypt from being, first and foremost, conceived of as a fight against inequality, and has favored other frameworks of resistance, such as those of fighting for human dignity, social justice or a right to health.
Relying on interviews with several doctors and a variety of other sources including statements, press releases and news reports, the paper showcases the mobilization of several groups of Egyptian doctors and their efforts, in different capacities, to reform the health system in Egypt, shedding light on some of their achievements and the challenges they have faced. Some of the groups examined include the board of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, “Doctors Without Rights,” The Committee for Defending People’s Right to Health, as well as public campaigns such as “What is More Important than Egyptians’ Health?,” NGOs such as “Tahrir Doctors” and The Association for Health and Environmental Development, and charitable organizations such as “Mercy Doctors.” The paper focuses on two major strikes by doctors in 2012 and 2014.
Relying on a historicized analysis of the role assigned to “experts” by the Egyptian state and public sphere, the paper highlights the paradox and limitations of the role of the “activist-expert.” Since doctors are the face of the healthcare system in Egypt, crumbling and predatory as it may be, their calls for reforming it have often been met with suspicion and skepticism from their patients. They have also often been met with hostility from the State which conveniently blames the deterioration of the healthcare system on doctors’ negligence and greed, as a way to let itself off the hook. On the other hand, and paradoxically, doctors’ expert and insider status and their social capital often act to legitimize their claims about the healthcare system, render them more credible, and validate their appeals to reform it.
The paper proposes the notion of the “organic doctor,” along the lines of Gramsci’s “organic intellectual,” to examine and understand these doctors’ mobilization, not as impartial caregivers, but very often as citizens with grievances themselves who see in their fight for the interests of “the people,” an accomplishment of their socio-professional vocation and a realization of their personal and professional value systems. In this context, the paper attempts to explore the moral, political and socioeconomic realities of “activist” doctors in Egypt, the variety of their experiences, the obstacles they face, and how they construe their mission in the face of skeptical patients and successive regimes that chose to remain deaf to their appeals. The paper concludes that unless stakeholders, viz. patients and ordinary citizens, are included, the fight to reform the Egyptian health system will bear little fruit.