Ethical Perception and Moral Horizon in Clinical Care-Work

• In Event: Refusal, Resistance, and Agency: Toward More Expansive Visions of Being and Becoming

Abstract

In this work, we show how ethical perception (Vossoughi et al., 2021)—the awareness of ethical importance of embodied actions—can reorient disciplinary practice toward moral horizons. We report findings from an ongoing study of physicians’ and caregivers’ experiences of the relationship between medical technologies and pain. We illustrate a) how the misrecognition of pain within a physician-patient interaction is rooted in Indigenous erasure and intergenerational trauma in disciplinary spaces (Bang et al., 2014; Marin, 2020; Tuck, 2011), and b) how canonical disciplinary practices in the context of Western medicine ignore, or make it difficult, and in some cases, even impossible to recognize these moments of pain and suffering.

Authors

• Santanu Dutta, University of Calgary

• Ariel Ducey, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary