Meghann OrmondWageningen University & Research | WUR · Department of Cultural Geography
Meghann Ormond
PhD in Geography
About
63
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Introduction
Meghann Ormond is Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University (NL). As a cultural geographer, an immigrant and ardent believer in the transformative potential of international travel, she's deeply invested in and concerned with how differently-mobile people's roots, rights and vulnerabilities are recognised and included in the places they visit and in which they live. Her research focuses mainly on how shifting visions and practices of citizenship and belonging transform transnational mobility, health and care relationships. Find out more at www.meghannormond.com
Additional affiliations
July 2010 - present
Publications
Publications (63)
This book’s examination of international medical travel (IMT) – where people cross national borders in the pursuit of healthcare – builds on an intersection of feminist and postcolonial scholarship that seeks to challenge embedded assumptions about the sources, directions and political value of care. In so doing, it contributes to contemporary soci...
International medical travel is increasingly big business. Using Indonesian patient-consumers’ transport experiences in the pursuit of private medical care in Malaysia, this paper explores how transport operators and infrastructure are responding and adjusting to the embodied specificities of the growing market’s access and travel needs. In offerin...
While scholars increasingly acknowledge that most contemporary international medical travel is comprised of South-South flows, these have gone curiously unexamined. Rather, policy, scholarly and media attention focuses predominantly on North-South flows of ‘medical tourists’. However, this focus diverts attention from the actual and potential impac...
In recent years, scholars have focused on the concept of Healthcare deservingness, observing that healthcare professionals, state authorities and the broader public make moral judgements about which migrants are deserving of health care and which are not. Such literature tends to focus on migrants with irregular status. This article examines how st...
In bringing people together that otherwise might have little more than passing contact with one another, tourism is appreciated for its potential to transform mindsets by fostering multi-perspectivity, a cornerstone of global citizenship education, among both ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. Hence, while tourism plays a significant role in marginalising an...
For people conscious and critical of their settler-colonial immigration heritage, the desire to forge and claim a deep connection with a plot of land can generate deep ambivalence. Engaging with Wall Kimmerer's reflections on indigeneity and migration, this essay explores the ways in which embodied and material practices of gardening and caring for...
This article explores tensions between urgency and climate justice in a climate activist movement context through the case study of Regenerative Cultures in Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. We argue that urgency obstructs climate justice through encouraging ‘whatever-it-takes’ mentalities that sideline justice concerns in the pursuit of action, an...
This is the third of a series of three International Creative Tourism Webinars in Spring 2021 within the umbrella of CREATOUR International. Conceived as “global conversations,” the webinars aim to create a platform for connecting research and practice in a spirit of co-learning.
As we look forward to “re-emergence” phases of social life and trave...
Het nieuwe en ernstige karakter van het virus en het gemak waarmee Covid-19 wordt overgedragen, hebben geleid tot verreikende en ongekende internationale reisbeperkingen. Dit essay richt zich op de manieren waarop nationale regeringen tijdens het begin van de Covid-19 crisis de internationale mobiliteit, waarvan ze de afgelopen decennia steeds afha...
The novelty and severity of the virus and the ease with which COVID-19 is transmitted have led to far-reaching and unprecedented international travel restrictions. This chapter focuses on the ways in which national governments scrambled at a moment of unprecedented crisis to manage different forms of international mobility on which they have grown...
The Netherlands is today home to an estimated 2.5 million people with disabilities, and this number is on the rise with the country's rapidly ageing population. Given that the Dutch government ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) only in 2016, there remains a lot to be done within the country to implement the...
Each year, millions of people around the world, disenfranchised by the restrictive national laws and unresponsive health systems in their countries of residence, circumvent such these barriers by travelling to countries where their desired medical treatment is more accessible to them. These transnational patients’ international medical travels (IMT...
Transnational medical travel -- the temporary movement by patients across national borders in order to address medical concerns abroad that are unable to be sufficiently met within their countries of residence -- is an important therapeutic coping strategy used by growing proportions of peoples with a diverse range of mobility profiles and intensit...
Transnational medical travel/tourism, by and large, involves travel to cities and metropolitan areas. Only urban areas possess the sufficient volume and variety of world-class medical expertise, cutting-edge technology, transportation infrastructure, communication and mediation facilities and hospitality services and infrastructure to be able to em...
Roots Guide is a novel tool developed to help us not only see the world differently but also be in the world differently. Taking the form of an interactive, reflective travel guidebook, Roots Guide invites us to undertake both outer and inner journeys by revisiting what we think we know about life in the Netherlands, starting on our very own doorst...
By offering ‘first-world’ care at ‘third-world’ prices, many private hospitals and clinics in the Global South have positioned themselves in recent decades as competitors with their counterparts in the Global North, targeting patients disappointed and disenfranchised by local care provision. Scholars, policy makers and industry actors alike have re...
Closed adoptions – where birth and adoption records are legally sealed to obscure adoptees’ biological parentage – were once the norm in many western Anglophone countries. Grassroots resistance to closed adoption relied upon the belief that deprivation of knowledge of their true biological origins could lead to psychological trauma among adoptees....
“…feeling entitled to say you are from a place that you didn’t grow up, but you chose to be a part of it, I think that is extraordinarily powerful.” – Meghann Ormond // A year ago, Hiraeth was invited to participate in a session on “Whose Heritages Matter” during a conference at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Meghann Ormond, Associate Pr...
The future of the private healthcare in Johor and in the Iskandar Malaysia (IM) special economic zone in particular is intimately tied to larger property developments and trends in the region, both because private healthcare developers are increasingly the same as property developers and because IM’s future population growth relies heavily on corpo...
Deirdre McKay, An Archipelago of Care: Filipino Migrants and Global Networks, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2016, 196 pp., pbk US $30, ISBN 13: 978-0-253-02467-1. - Volume 38 Issue 5 - MEGHANN ORMOND
This paper draws on an affirmative biopolitical framework to analyze the governing of young lives in education and social spaces in Cusco, Peru. We engage with Berlant’s theorization of affect and spatialization of biopolitics in order to discuss youth’s embodied experiences of alternative forms of biopolitical governance. With a case study of a gr...
In October 2016, the Global Healthcare Policy and Management Forum was held at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. The goal of the forum was to discuss the role of the state in regulating and supporting the development of medical tourism. Forum attendees came from 10 countries. In this short report article, we identify key lessons from the forum...
With more people living longer than ever before, populations' medical and long-term care needs are increasingly placing strain on individual and collective resources and capacities. Neoliberal policies have (restructured d care relations by (redistributing g health and social care in ways that (re-)domesticate, individualize and commoditize respons...
Through an examination of two festivals – Qing Ming and Cap Go Meh – in the town of Singkawang in Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), we show how Singkawang-bound Chinese Indonesian tourists and their Singkawang-based relatives produce a diasporic heritage network through ‘moorings’ generated by both transnational and internal migration. Instead of ret...
Tapping into migrants’ diverse tacit healthcare knowledge can bring a range of stakeholders in countries of origin great insight, at both macro and micro levels, not only into how to improve on local healthcare delivery but also how to effectively respond to the needs and interests of ‘medical tourists’, travellers and other migrants. This chapter...
Websites of private hospitals promoting medical tourism are important marketing channels for showcasing and promoting destinations’ medical facilities and their array of staff expertise, services, treatments and equipment to domestic and foreign patient-consumers alike. This study examines the websites of private hospitals promoting medical tourism...
In this study we analyzed state-level economic impacts of medical tourism in Malaysia. In Malaysia, a country that ranks among the world’s most recognized medical tourism destinations, medical tourism is identified as a potential economic growth engine for both medical and non-medical sectors. A state-level analysis of economic impacts is important...
Many of the world’s demographically oldest countries are increasingly ‘outsourcing’ care from abroad for their elderly. Indeed, seniors wishing to age in place in countries like Germany and Singapore are making – and in some cases, as in Japan, beginning to explore how to make – use of at-home help, frequently provided by female migrant care worker...
In this chapter, we look at how economic, political, social, cultural and biological influences work together within the space of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) political, economic and social ‘community’ experiment, which today encompasses over 600 million people. We focus specifically on how economic liberalization and the cor...
In Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s 2003 documentary film The Five Obstructions, von Trier uses the method of ‘obstructive limitation’ to disrupt conventional filmmaking habits that inhibit Leth from seeing, experiencing and relating the story in alternative ways. In this intellectual exercise, Leth must creatively respond to a set of rules and obs...
This two-day conference aims to bring together scholars from academic and research institutions from around the globe in order to critically examine and discuss existing and emerging national, sub-national, transnational and cross-sectoral strategies for the following:
• Promoting and dissuading ‘medical tourism’ and ‘transnational patient mobilit...
Medical tourism industry has experienced a rapid growth in recent years, witnessing an increase
in tourists’ mobility to seek healthcare services. Even though India positions itself as a prominent
key player in medical tourism industry in the world, strategic knowledge from the perspective of
suppliers remains limited. This study explores the...
Background: Medical tourism is now targeted by many hospitals and governments worldwide for further growth and investment. Southeast Asia provides what is perhaps the best documented example of medical tourism development and promotion on a regional scale, but interest in the practice is growing in locations where it is not yet established. Numerou...
This chapter provides an overview of current government strategies relative to medical tourism development and management around the world. Most studies on medical tourism have privileged national governments as key actors in medical tourism facilitation and regulation and, in some cases, even provision. However, with the multiplication of supra- a...
Why exactly can an American save up to 80% on a medical procedure by simply travelling to Malaysia? Flush with excitement over the panacea medical tourism seems to promise so many, have stakeholders paused long enough in the construction of the medical tourism industry to reflect on what this fact says about the striking economic, social, political...
Globally, more patients are intentionally travelling abroad as consumers for medical care. However, while scholars have begun to examine international medical travel's (IMT) impacts on the people and places that receive medical travellers, study of its impacts on medical travellers' home contexts has been negligible and largely speculative. While p...
Growing numbers of people are going abroad in pursuit of healthcare, and the social, political and economic significance of these flows at a range of levels cannot be ignored. This special issue brings together papers from a key international conference held in June 2013, Transnational Healthcare: a Cross-border Symposium – an event that was itself...
Following on the identification of medical tourism as a growth sector by the Malaysian government in 1998, over the last 15 years significant governmental and private-sector investment has been channelled into its development. This is unfolding within the broader context of social services being devolved to for-profit enterprises and ‘market-capabl...
Malaysian authorities’ desire for foreign patient-consumers from higher-income countries and the spectacular medical tourism infrastructure being developed to cater to them exists in contrast to the actual everyday flows of intra-regional lower-income patient-consumers who, comprising the bulk of medical travellers to Malaysia, have been fundamenta...
Contemporary medical tourism builds upon longstanding links between travel and the pursuit of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is produced today through the combination of, on the one hand, shifts in concentrations of accessible medical expertise and technologies around the world and, on the other, increased medicalization, care commo...
This exploratory study analyses user-generated web content in Singapore and Malaysia to examine how the management of Singapore’s rapidly aging population within the emerging cross-border metropolitan space of Singapore and the Southern Malaysian state of Johor is perceived and framed by different social actors. It reveals a range of perspectives o...
Migrant diasporas are increasingly pegged as the ‘natural’ markets for and ‘ambassadors’ to the world-class private health care increasingly available in their countries of origin. This chapter explores the pursuit and provision of health care by migrant populations ‘back home’, and examines the potential of healthcare to deepen their diasporic lin...
‘Culturally-competent’ patient-centred care plays an increasingly expedient role in medical tourism destinations’ ability to capture international patient-consumer markets. While Malaysia’s ethnic, linguistic and religious pluralism had been framed as threatening to nation-building efforts in the early period following independence, recent decades...
Drawing on literature on self-help and travel guide writing, this paper interrogates five international medical travel guidebooks aimed at encouraging American and British audiences to travel abroad to purchase medical care. These guidebooks articulate a three-step self-help "program" to produce a "savvy" international medical traveler. First, read...
"Medical tourism" has frequently been held to unsettle naturalised relationships between the state and its citizenry. Yet in casting "medical tourism" as either an outside "innovation" or "invasion," scholars have often ignored the role that the neoliberal retrenchment of social welfare structures has played in shaping the domestic health-care syst...
Considering the growing relevance of healthcare-motivated travel across borders, this chapter draws attention to tensions derived from destinations’ focus on satisfying the needs of the desired western ‘medical tourist’ while the more everyday intraregional flows of medical travellers, though constituting the bulk of international medical travel to...
This thesis examines the shifting relationship between the state and its subjects with regard to responsibility for and entitlement to care. Using Malaysia as a case study the research engages with international medical travel (IMT) as an outcome of the neoliberal retrenchment of the welfare state. I offer a critical reading of postcolonial develop...
div>The family lives of immigrants and ethnic minority populations have become central to arguments about the right and wrong ways of living in multicultural societies. While the characteristic cultural practices of such families have long been scrutinized by the media and policy makers, these groups themselves are beginning to reflect on how to ma...
Book abstract:
The family lives of immigrants and ethnic minority populations have become central to arguments about the right and wrong ways of living in multicultural societies. While the characteristic cultural practices of such families have long been scrutinized by the media and policy makers, these groups themselves are beginning to reflect o...
Contemporary medical tourism builds upon longstanding links between travel and the pursuit of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is produced today through the combination of, on the one hand, shifts in concentrations of accessible medical expertise and technologies around the world and, on the other, increased medicalization, care commo...
The preliminary report for the project, 'Reunificação familiar e imigração em Portugal' ('Family reunification and immigration in Portugal'), is divided into two parts, organised in four chapters. The first part provides a framework of the phenomenon of family reunification and the integration of immigrants in host societies, by examining the exper...
This paper examines the kinds of politics that are enabled by the Internet with respect to immigrants to the United States; its primary concern is whether the political spaces created through the Internet can foster incorporation of immigrants in the political community or whether the political activity on the Internet seems likely to lead to a mor...