Placing Care: Embodying Architecture in Hospital Clinics for Immigrant Patients

• In Event: 262 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01.

Abstract

Hospitals are places where people, objects, and ideas meet and interact. In their physicality hospitals install routines in bodies by insisting on particular paths that people move along daily. Waiting rooms, exam rooms, and corridors create embodied routines that become natural and invisible. At the same time, hospitals are reconfigured by users and constantly redesigned and transformed in response to the social, scientific, and political settings in which they are situated. “Placing Care” explores the impact and reconfiguration of physical space, routines, regulations, and technologies in encounters between adult immigrant/refugee patients and caregivers in two outpatient clinics in one hospital in Maine. It draws from 9 months of fieldwork in 2012 that included following patients and their interpreters into and out of exam rooms. It identifies assumptions about patients, practitioners, and forms of healing embedded in the clinics; how the clinics’ physicality establishes biomedical routines and ways of knowing in clinic staff, patients, and interpreters; and how staff, patients and interpreters continually redefine, re-evaluate and reconstruct these places and routines.

Author

• Susan E. Bell, Drexel University