Contingent Citizens examines the ambiguous state of South Africa-s public sector workers and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It takes us inside an ethnography of the professional ethic of nurses in a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, shaped by a deep history of mission medicine and changing forms of new public management. Liberal democratic principles of -transparency-, -decentralization- and -rights-, though promising freedom from control, often generate fear and insecurity instead. But despite the pressures they face, Elizabeth Hull shows that nurses draw on a range of practices from international migration to new religious movements, to assert new forms of citizenship. Focusing an anthropological lens on -professionalism-, Hull explores the major fault lines of South Africa-s fragmented social landscape - class, gender, race, and religion - to make an important contribution to the study of class formation and citizenship. This prize-winning monograph
