Colonial and Transnational Intimacies: Medical Humanitarianism in the French external Resistance, 1940-1945

This project offers the first intimate history of international medical cooperation during the Second World War, through an examination of close bodily encounters between medical staff and patients in various sites across the world. It transcends institutional and state-centred approaches that currently dominate the historiography of Allied medicine and international health cooperation to assess how intimate care relations between medical staff and patients reshaped existing colonial and inter-allied relationships. The Second World War elicited important new physical, cultural and bodily encounters between individuals of diverse gender, ethnic, national, class, age and religious backgrounds. These forms of interactions have yet to be addressed in a transnational context and on a grass-roots level. This project interrogates how these interactions transformed individual and collective group identities, shaped international cooperation and, in some cases, fuelled anti-colonial dynamics. Drawing on the methodologies associated with the global micro-history turn, it focuses on different medical spaces set up by the French external Resistance in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. These include the international Hadfield Spears Hospital (case study 1), the dispensaries, field and base hospitals in Free French Africa (case study 2) and the Mobile Surgical Units that followed the French Army in Italy and France (case study 3). These international medical spaces, which were both sites of bodily and intimate desires and high political tensions, offer a valuable lens through which to reassess the ways in which staff and patients enacted and contested ideas about race, religion, sexuality, pain and the body within the setting of a global war.

By placing colonial and transnational intimacies centre stage, this project has three central aims. The first is to evaluate the role of cultural ideas about the sexed, gendered, racialised, othered and wounded body in shaping foreign policy and military operations. The second is to uncover how military and medical authorities and voluntary organisations politicized intimate care and drew moral and sexual boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable forms of corporeal intimacy. The third is to reconsider the experiences of patients themselves, insisting on their agency in negotiating the treatment that was provided to them and exploring the affective consequences of medical categorisations on their individual identities. The medical spaces of the French Resistance provide a paradigmatic case to study the ways in which contests over political authority amongst French and Allied military elites took place at the level of individual bodies. French resisters were considered as 'pariahs' on the international stage and were highly dependent on their Allies and colonies for resources and legitimacy. Their medical spaces were thus remarkably heterogeneous, both in terms of the origins of its staff and patients, and in relation to the broad spectrum of medical traditions and practices that co-existed within them. An examination of these diverse spaces therefore offers a fascinating insight into complex social, gender, religious, professional and ethnic identities, belief systems and subjectivities.

Recent spotlights on the #AidToo movement have raised public awareness on the centrality of gender to understanding the current humanitarian system. By offering historical insights onto intimate bodily encounters, this project will contribute to current debates on gender inequalities and lay stronger foundations for future histories and studies of humanitarianism. Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival documents, personal testimonies and photographs, it will alter our understanding of international medical cooperation and provide a crucial reassessment of the relationships between medical practices, bodily interactions, emotional ideals and individual behaviours of interest to a wide range of audiences.

Planned Impact
This project will benefit a diverse range of academic and non-academic partners. In addition to impact through traditional academic routes of dissemination (peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, preparation for a monograph subsequent to the project), the project findings will contribute to widening participation school activities for year 10 and 11 students and two collaborative workshops with NGOs.

1. Outreach programmes: three campus-based workshops for year 10 and 11 students
Three workshops will be offered at different dates in the year to suit schools and organised with the Widening Participation team at the University of Manchester. They are aimed at Key Stage 4 GCSE learners from local communities in Greater Manchester and the North West, where progression rates to University are among the lowest in the UK. Workshops will be made relevant and stimulating by incorporating primary source accounts. Students will be asked to create a digital map of the journey of the International Hadfield-Spears Hospital through the Middle East, Africa and Europe using the Articque Map software. Students' maps and work will be publicised on the project website. These activities will specifically:
(a) enhance pupils' knowledge and understanding of the global nature of the war
(b) encourage debate and critical enquiry around race, gender and medicine in war
(c) help to promote social cohesion by inculcating mutual respect and tolerance with those with different faith, language and beliefs
(d) introduce students to history at university: it will give pupils a taste of research-led teaching and equip them with the tools to ensure that they have the best chance of studying history at university.
An article on the ways this material can be use in the classroom will be submitted to the Historical Association's magazine Teaching History.

2. Two workshops with NGOs at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (Manchester)
Partnering with the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) will allow research from the proposal to be disseminated to NGOs accessibly across and beyond the UK. HCRI has an internationally acclaimed track record in impact related activity and unique infrastructure that with help to sustain relationships with beneficiaries beyond the life of the project. The first workshop ('Reckoning with gender: embodied differences in past and present humanitarian interventions') will contribute to current debates about structural inequalities and gender abuse within the current humanitarian system and involve Save the Children, members of the Centre de Réflexion sur l'Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires from the Fondation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF-Crash) and editors of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs. The second workshop ('Violence against healthcare from a gender perspective') will be set up in cooperation with the Fondation de la Croix-Rouge Française (Paris) to better understand the extent, causes and consequences of gendered violence against healthcare. Podcasts of the two-day workshops will be made available on the project website. Both workshops will contribute to an on-going engagement between humanitarian actors and history writing.

3. Social media: website, blogs and Twitter
The project team will publicise their research findings as the project develops in a series of blogs and dedicated Twitter feed. The website will contain resources for secondary school teachers and pupils and include blogs in French and English that will consider how a historical perspective can further understanding of contemporary dynamics of gender and race within the humanitarian system of interest to journalists, NGOs and UN representatives. These blogs will be especially relevant as they will contribute to on-going debates surrounding the issue of sexual exploitation within NGOs and by NGOs workers and the problem of the culture of prostitution that still accompanies the large deployment of UN forces.