Documents, education, and aesthetics: Exploring processes of subjectification among community health workers in Peru

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the processes of subjectification involving community health workers in the Peruvian Andes. Community health worker programmes keep education at the core, striving to provide marginalized people with information about mother-and-child health, family planning, nutrition, and illness prevention, among other things. Education is one of the arenas where Foucauldian themes of subjectification are most explicit (Kipnis 2011). However, the subjectivities such development programmes seek to produce by training and monitoring those involved are not necessarily those that emerge. In studies of health policies and their implementation in targeted areas, the focus tends to be on how governmentality discourses and techniques produce responsible and governable subjects. However, little attention has been paid to understanding the processes of subjectification and how they are interpreted and enacted by the targeted subjects (Winkler-Reid 2017). This article aims to illuminate how community health workers use their embodied understanding of school literacy and aesthetics to engage with specific community health-related tasks. It argues that aesthetics is a central part of the formation of subjectivity and that expectations of aesthetic qualities similar to those of classroom situations contribute to accentuating the community health workers becoming ‘good students’. In this specific setting, being evaluated as a ‘good student’ receives more emphasis than other goals of the community health worker programme, such as providing easier access to health care services for their fellow community members.