DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Research and Teaching Interests

Global health, health sector reform, development, transnational governance and policy, international volunteerism, institutional culture and bureaucracy, gender and sexuality, medical waste, eastern Africa and United States

 

Biography

Noelle Sullivan is a medical and sociocultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research on Tanzania’s health sector since 2005. Sullivan has served as core faculty for Northwestern’s Program of Global Health Studies since 2012.

In fall 2024, Sullivan assumed the Director role after Dr. William Leonard stepped down after 20 years of exemplary service in the role.

In addition to her current role as Director of the Program, Sullivan participates in NUIT’s “Brain Trust” team, consulting on accessibility technologies and initiatives to enhance learning for NU’s diverse student body, and has advocated for meaningful supports for neurodivergent learners through the Academic Support and Learning Advancement Office.

In 2018, Sullivan was named Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Lecturer, Northwestern University’s highest honor for teaching stream faculty. She was also a Faculty Fellow at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities (2019-2020), a Fellow in the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching (2018-2019), and a Fellow in Northwestern’s Public Voices Fellowship with the Op-Ed Project (2016-2017). Currently, she participates as a Faculty Fellow in the Curricular Fellowship Program of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (2018-2021).

Sullivan’s book in preparation, The Business of Good Intentions: Reframing the Global Health Volunteering Debate, examines the real-world effects and implications of international voluntourism in under-resourced health sectors. The book is based on empirical research in Tanzania since 2008, including over 1600 hours of observations of international volunteer-Tanzanian interactions in health facilities. The project examines how the for-profit voluntourism industry maps onto the under-resourced health system in Tanzania and elsewhere, and to what effect for international volunteers and hosting health professionals, patients, and institutions. The Business of Good Intentions puts aside polarizing debates about voluntourism in health care settings and instead focuses on systematic drives and wider implications of global health volunteering. In doing so, the book considers how history and economics collude in the for-profit voluntourism industry to seemingly render moral a variety of unmarked and problematic tropes that inform popular ideas about doing good elsewhere. Parts of this research have also been published in Global Public Health, and in the edited volume Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa (James Currey).

In addition, Sullivan is currently completing a popular press book entitled Stretch: A Sister’s Memoir in the Aftermath of Murder. Sullivan’s brother, Adam Colquhoun, nicknamed “Stretch,” was a homicide victim in 2018 in Calgary, Alberta. Stretch was the kind of person society finds convenient to throw away. His long history of illicit drug dealing, theft, history of multiple incarcerations, untreated bipolar, addiction, suicidal ideation, and punctuated episodes of homelessness made his humanity “undesirable” in an imagined “good society.” Yet after decades of struggles, by age 40 Adam had an epiphany, and changed how he thought about his life. He wanted to share the wisdom he’d learned, and was taking up opportunities to, as he called it, “give back more than I’ve taken.” The memoir is titled after Sullivan’s brother, but the title is also a nod to the process of trying to find meaning after devastating loss, when memory, like other sorts of evidence, is fallible and incomplete. The book reveals Sullivan’s discoveries about who Stretch was, how he mattered, and what the story of his life, his death, and the trial of the man who killed him can tell us. Suturing together their shared past as siblings to the future of the person convicted for Adam’s death, Stretch opens up possibilities of rethinking mental illness, addiction, grief, justice, family, healing, the value of a life, and the kind of society we want to build.

Sullivan’s previous research was a longitudinal ethnographic investigation of Tanzanian health institutions in transition in the wake of health sector reform and externally-funded global health interventions, primarily for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and reproductive health. It traces the ways that public health facilities in Tanzania adopted, absorbed, and creatively engaged with the constraints and opportunities presented by donor-funded and government-prioritized initiatives from 2005-2017. With the Tanzanian government encouraging local institutions to establish public private partnerships, or PPPs, this research extends Sullivan’s 2008 original dissertation research to determine how institutions attempt to create PPPs and their own, institutionally-owned private businesses, in order to tackle pressing infrastructural and capacity shortages in the absence of government and donor support. This study of remaking of public health sectors through market logics and global health intervention provides important insights about the broader impacts of scarcity, narrow health targets, and even narrower budgets on opportunities and constraints that health sectors face in Tanzania, and beyond. This research has been published in peer reviewed journals including Africa: Journal of the International African Institute; Social Science and Medicine, Critical Public Health, Medical Anthropology, and Space and Culture.

 

 

Global Health Courses Taught

Introduction to Global Health (formerly Introduction to International Public Heath)

Volunteerism and the Ethics of Help

Global Health from Policy to Practice

Biomedicine and Culture

Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health, and Pleasure

 

Recent Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

2020               “Like a Real Hospital”: Imagining Hospital Futures through Homegrown Public

Private Partnerships in Tanzania. For special issue “Beyond Realism: Anthropology of Africa’s Medical Dreams.” Africa: Journal of

the International African Institute 90(1): 209-228. Noémi Tousignant & P. Wenzel Geissler, guest editors. doi: 10.1017/S0001972019001013

2020                (with Meredith Marten) Hospital Side Hustles: Funding Conundrums and

Perverse Incentives in Tanzania’s Publicly-funded Health Sector. Social Science and Medicine 244, 112662. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112662

2018                International Clinical Volunteering in Tanzania: A Postcolonial Analysis of a Global Health Business. For special issue, “Mobility and (Dis)connectivity in the Global Health Enterprise,” Dominik Mattes and Hansjörg Dilger, guest editors, Global Public Health 33(3): 310-324. doi: 10.1080/17441692.2017.1346695

2017                 Multiple Accountabilities: Development Co-operation, Transparency, and the Politics of Unknowing in Tanzania’s Health Sector. In special section “In Search

of Results: Anthropological Interrogations of Evidence-Based Global Health.” Elanah Uretsky and Elsa Fan, special editors, Critical Public Health 17(2): 193-204. doi: 10.1080/09581596.2016.1264572

2012                Enacting Spaces of Inequality: Placing Global/State Governance within a Tanzanian Hospital. In special issue, Hospital Heterotopias: Comparative Ethnographies of Biomedical Places. Alice Street and Simon Coleman, eds. Space and Culture 15(1):57-67. doi: 10.1177/1206331211426057

2011                Mediating Abundance and Scarcity: Implementing an HIV/AIDS-Targeted Project within a Government Hospital in Tanzania. In special issue, Global AIDS Medicine in East African Health Institutions. Anita Hardon and Hansjörg Dilger, eds. Medical Anthropology 30(2):202-221. doi:10.1080/01459740.2011.552453

2010                (with Hansjörg Dilger, and David Garcia) Negotiating Professionalism,

Economics, and Altruism: An Appeal for Ethnographic Approaches to African Medical Migration. African Diaspora 3(2):237-254. doi:10.1163/187254610X526931

Peer Reviewed Book Chapters

2016                Hosting Gazes: Clinical Volunteer Tourism and Hospital Hospitality in Tanzania. In Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa. Ruth Prince and Hannah Brown, eds. Pp. 140-163. Rochester, NY: James Currey.

 

2016                (with Claire Wendland and Susan Erikson). Beneath the Spin: Moral Complexity and Rhetorical Simplicity in ‘Global Health.’ In Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa. Ruth Prince and Hannah Brown, eds. Pp. 164-182. Rochester, NY: James Currey.

Op-Eds

2020                “COVID-19 is a Stress Test for the WHO.” The Hill, April 25^th. (with Shailey Prasad)

2020                “How to Inform and Empower Children during COVID-19.” The Hill, March 13^th.

2018                “There are Better Ways to Fight Poverty than Giving Money to Corporations.” Huffington Post, May 24^th. (with Lisa Ann Richey)

2018                “HIV’s Ancient ‘Cousin’ is Ravaging Australia and Could Spread Worldwide.” The Hill, May 8^th.

2018                “Baby Steps in the Senate are just That.” The Hill, April 20^th.

2018                “Marital Status should not Define a Woman.” Role Reboot, April 4^th.

2018                “When Volunteering Abroad does more Harm than Good.” Huffington Post, Feb. 11^th.

2017                “Who Leads WHO Matters: Why Misconceptions about Africa Persist.” Medium, June 23.

2017                “The AHCA Debate is Missing Crucial Healthcare Costs” The Hill, June 1.

2017                “The Trouble with Medical 'Voluntourism’” Scientific American, May 16.

2017                “Why Market Logic Can't Solve the US Health Care Crisis.” Truthout. May 15.

2017                “The Right Way to Give.” US News & World Report, April 19th.

2017                “Why International Medical Volunteering Does More Harm Than Good.” Role Reboot. April 14th.

2017                “Neoliberalism is Killing Us: Economic Stress as a Driver of Global Depression and Suicide.” Truthout. April 2nd.

2017                “Telling the Anti-Vaccine Community They're Wrong has been Tried for Years Now, and it Doesn't Work--Here's Another Approach.” Alternet. March 14th.

2017                “Global Gag Rule's Impact Goes Far Beyond Abortion.” Footnote. Feb. 10th.

2017                “New Administration must Look to Recent Past for Global Health Lessons.” The Hill. Jan. 18th.

2016                “Why is Healthcare so Expensive in the United States?” The Hill. Dec. 6th.

2016                “We Need to Stop Sending Unskilled Volunteers to Countries that Need Care.” VICE Motherboard. Nov. 15^th.

2016                “Global Poor's Medical Care would be Unethical in US” Orlando Sentinel. Feb. 25.