Marking the Boundaries of Care in/and Definitions of Refugee Medical Encounters

Mais T. Al-Khateeb is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. Her research engages 20th and 21st centuries contemporary rhetorical theory from a transnational feminist perspective with a focus on refugees, their embodiments, and their mobilities. Al-Khateeb’s in-progress monograph traces refugee screening rhetorics to examine how they materialize and shape refugee encounters in local and global contexts. Other research interests include disability studies, feminist studies of science and technology, posthumanism, and new materialism. Al-Khateeb’s published and forthcoming work appears in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and edited collections Abstract: This essay brings together transnational feminist rhetorical studies and critical conversations in care with scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and technical and professional communication (TPC) to propose a methodological framework for reading and reimagining cultural interventions in transnational health contexts. This framework, what I term unexceptional logics of care, centers analyses of globalized power to interrogate the logics underlying the composition of cultural interventions intended to support refugees and health providers in health contexts. Using this framework to analyze the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) 2014-2017 “Refugee Health Profiles,” I demonstrate how and why cultural interventions can become rhetorically entangled with logics of US exceptionalism that can limit the imaginaries of caregivers and foreclose possibilities for responsive care encounters. The analysis highlights three central logics (comparison, (re)victimization, and recognition of evidence) to consider in the construction of cultural interventions to challenge “non-performative” and/or violent forms of care in refugee health contexts.