Ren Capucao, MSN, RN, and PhD
(Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry, School of Nursing, University of Virginia)
Filipino nurses’ disproportionate mortality in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic underscores an uneven labor migration and exposure to workplace risks. More broadly, their deaths raise the persisting specter of American imperialism and its unresolved and repetitive violence over Filipino nurses dating back to the US colonial period in the Philippines. The violence during this period, however, remains obscured by colonial discourses of care tied to American benevolence and modern nursing’s cultural association with altruism. This talk thus delves into the underbelly of care by foregrounding the subjectivities and lived experiences of Filipino nurses, who variously accepted, resisted, or succumbed to the standards and strains of a racialized modernity. It discusses these nurses’ agency amidst the institutionalization of nursing in the Philippines and the racialization of Filipinos’ caring ability. Click here to join on Zoom.
Dr. Capucao will also deliver Grand Rounds for the Department of Medicine at 12pm noon the same day. To see "Adiós Muchacho, Hello Nurse: Efficiency at the Philippine General Hospital, 1898–1916," use the “virtual meeting click to watch” link on the Medicine Grand Rounds homepage.
Dr. Capucao is a nurse historian and postdoctoral research associate affiliated with the Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia, where he also earned his B.A., M.S.N., and Ph.D. As a US Fulbright scholar at the University of the Philippines College of Nursing, he co-authored the book Saving Lives, Raising Standards: The History of UP Nursing, which illustrates the role of the University of the Philippines, from US colonization to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the national development of the nursing profession. His research and teaching approach the modern history of nursing and healthcare in the Philippines and the United States through a comparative and transnational lens. Through the study of Filipino nurses, he depicts how the success of normative assimilation remains bound to oppressive structures that maintain social inequality, induce vulnerability and risk, and wear down physical and mental health.
*Please note the new time! After decades of events at 6pm on Tuesday evenings, we are pushing back the start time to 7pm to better accommodate folks who are commuting, have sign-out after a shift, or are joining us from more western time zones. We are also no longer catering dinner since the pandemic. Therefore, all lectures will begin at 7pm Eastern and wrap up by 8:15pm.*
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