Healing foreigners in France: The State and the civil society organisations from the 80s to the 90s
Caroline Izambert
Caroline Izambert is a former history and geography teacher and has a doctorate from the EHESS. Her thesis focused on access to healthcare for foreigners in France. She is currently the director of advocacy for the anti-HIV and hepatitis association AIDES. With Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Pierre-André Juven, she published Pandémopolitique. Réinventer la santé commun (La Découverte, 2021).
Caroline Izambert defended, at the EHESS, her PhD thesis focusing on the foreigners’ access to healthcare in France. Its title: “Healing foreigners?” The State and the civil society organisations for the health coverage of the poor and foreigners in France from the 1980s to the present day. In this work, she undertakes a history of social protection for foreigners and the role held by civil society organisations in its evolution. She is particularly interested in MSF and MDM who, since the second half of the 1980s set up healthcare centers in place in Paris and elsewhere in France in order to treat “the new poor”. She consulted the organizations’ archives and led numerous interviews with key actors of this little-known history.
This debate-conference was the occasion to dive into MSF’s “Mission France” of the 1980s and 1990s, and the debates, first and foremost internal, on the role and limits of the association in the medico-social domain. Relationship with the State and partner organizations, mobilization of figures and narratives to “make proof”, or even the inherent impossibility to untangle the personal background of the actors of this history with the projects they carry, these questions resonate with more recent experiences and debates within our organization, most notably in the context of projects aimed at caring for migrants.
To cite this content :
Caroline Izambert, “Healing foreigners in France: The State and the civil society organisations from the 80s to the 90s ”, 17 décembre 2018, URL : https://msf-crash.org/en/conferences-debates/healing-foreigners-france-state-and-civil-society-organisations-80s-90s
If you want to criticize or develop this content, you can find us on twitter or directly on our site.
ContributePast events
Conference
Asylum and exile. A history of the distinction between migrants / refugees
04/12/2021 - 04:30 PM 06:30 PMOn April 12 2021 we had the great pleasure of hosting a virtual CRASH conference with political scientist and sociologist Karen Akoka, fresh from her publication in November of “Asylum and Exile. A History of the Refugee/Migrant Distinction" (La Découverte, 2020). The author described and analyzed the trajectory of OFPRA, the French institution founded in 1952 and responsible for granting refugee status; she provided an insight into how the history of the distinction between migrants and refugees was established in France.
Conference
Clinical trials, between science and financial and academic interests
10/08/2020 - 04:00 PM 06:00 PMPierre Chirac, pharmacist and editor of the journal Prescrire, presented his analysis of the pharmaceutical industry's influence strategies and the special interests of university hospital researchers, their consequences on the reliability of drug information and the means now required to rectify a harmful situation.
Conference
The quantification of needs
12/10/2020 - 05:00 PM 07:00 PMCombining historical research and ethnographic investigations, the Africanist historian Joël Glasman plunges us into the factory of the homo humanitarianus, the average individual, on the basis of which "needs" and aid projects today are assessed. This conversation took place on December 10th 2020, during a conference-debate at Crash.
Conference
Territories: the illusion of identity
12/16/2019 - 05:00 PM 07:00 PMConference-debate on Monday 16 December 2019, 6-8pm in the 1st floor meeting room at MSF, 14-34 avenue Jean Jaurès 75019 Paris. Streaming and simultaneous translation into English available.
Can we talk about the specificities of the Middle East, Iran or the Mediterranean without reducing these territories to a culture or religion? On December 16, 2019, the CRASH team organised a conference-debate with Jean-François Bayart, a French political scientist who has devoted his work to the sociology of the State and identity illusions.
Conference
Motivations for mass violence: different interpretations
10/03/2019 - 04:00 PM 06:00 PMConference – debate, Thursday, 3 October 2019, 6-8pm, 1st floor meeting room at MSF, 8 rue Saint Sabin. Streaming and simultaneous translation into English available.
What turns ordinary men into killers? The CRASH team invited you to a conference – debate with the sociologist and historian, Nicolas Mariot, author of an article entitled « Faut-il être motivé pour tuer? Sur quelques explications aux violences de guerre » (Genèses, n°53, 2003, p. 154-177) and books such as “Face à la persécution. 991 Juifs dans la guerre" (with Claire Zalc, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2010), “Tous unis dans la tranchée ? 1914-1918, les intellectuels rencontrent le peuple" (Paris, Seuil, 2013). Nicolas Mariot presented two different interpretations of motivations for mass violence in the 20th century, drawn from a series of studies and surveys on the subject.
Conference
Third-Worldism and Sans-Frontiérisme 1954-1988
04/11/2019 - 04:30 PM 06:30 PMEleanor Davey, historian of ideas and humanitarianism, senior lecturer at the Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute, University of Manchester, discusses her book, Idealism Beyond Borders. The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988, devoted to the intellectual history of sans-frontiérisme and Third-Worldism, in France, from the Algerian war to the early years of Médecins Sans Frontières.