Reflections on a failed participatory workshop in Northern Chile: Negotiating boycotts, benefits, and the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people.

In this paper, we critically analyse our experiences of initiating participatory research in the challenging context of the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. We use our experience of organising participatory workshops with Aymara and Quechua women community leaders to reflect on the politics of participation/non-participation, and explore these experiences in light of our multiple and overlapping positionalities as Chilean/British, male/female, white/mestizo. In the light of one workshop being entirely unsuccessful, we discuss the ways in which our empirical and methodological thinking has nevertheless been enriched by this experience.

Peruvian community health promoters: expanding the spaces of health voluntarism.

This paper emphasises the importance of recognising the global South as a key site for understanding the patterning of geographies of health voluntarism. Feeding into a broader critique of neoliberal health and development policies, the paper explores what a case study of health promoters in a popular settlement in Lima, Peru, can add to our understanding of practices of health voluntarism rooted in distinct places, emphasising the uneven and gendered nature of such voluntary activity. In particular, the paper considers the ways in which urban community spaces are negotiated, inhabited and shaped by volunteer women health workers, arguing that an exploration of these everyday practices provides a more nuanced picture of the role of voluntarism in healthcare provisioning under neoliberal regimes.