'Geography should never be why a child dies:' Spatial narratives and the Pediatric Medical Clinic of the Americas

My dissertation is an ethnography of the Pediatric Medical Clinic of the Americas (PMCA), a humanitarian organization in the Upper South USA with an economically elite donor base that focuses on critically ill children in the developing world. Using Geography, Medical Anthropology, and Human Rights discourse, I ask and answer the following question: How do the archives, everyday office, and fundraising processes of PMCA interact to create powerful stories that are both about and produce PMCA as well as the wide range of places affected by the charity's cultural politics? My data and analysis emphasizes the importance of spatial narratives--event-driven stories about the real or imagined places where people's activities intersect---as an empirical context for understanding how geographic scales are produced, experienced, and differentiated, and the project's focus on a humanitarian organization provides the capacity to more fully understand precisely how the spatiality of human connection underlies the concept of both "humanity" and "human rights." This dissertation shows how geographical scales and differences may be produced through the very processes that seek to bridge them, as the contradictory nature of elite philanthropy lies in this evidence, that organized activities to address inequality are required to simultaneously reinforce these inequalities.