ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the preoccupations and matters (i.e., figures) at play during a meeting organizing a large-scale vaccine campaign involving significant inter-organizational collaboration. I wish to illustrate how representatives from the humanitarian aid organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins sans frontiéres (MSF)—who constantly face emerging disorders brought by the contexts in which they operate—evoke extremeness through discourse in order to push for a specific medical agenda. More precisely, I empirically show how MSF representatives make this notion of extremeness speak in order to enroll local health collaborators to cooperate. The analysis hones in on one meeting in the Democratic Republic of Congo between MSF representatives and Congolese counterparts. In order to analyze the data, I mobilize a ventriloqual approach to communication to highlight contradicting yet complementary figures of normalcy and emergency through which the medical imperatives are negotiated, thus impacting the process of (dis)organizing.
