We Lost Our Interpreter, Have to Use the Phone: Assembling Interpreters in Healthcare Settings

• In Event: 1455 - Sources of Support

Abstract

In the twenty-first century more and more people cross borders for longer distances and varying lengths of time with differentiated and uneven rates, pathways and routes of mobility (Burawoy 2001). In 2015, 224 million people worldwide were living in a country other than the one in which they were born, including almost 20 million refugees. In the US, 27 percent of the population is immigrants or children of immigrants (84.3 million), and more than 9 percent of people ages 5 and (25.9 million) report limited English proficiency (LEP) (Zong and Batalova 2017). US hospitals have developed a variety of strategies to meet federal requirements and provide culturally and linguistically appropriate health care for LEP patients. A key element in the strategy is the use of healthcare interpreters. This paper analyzes the contingent and unstable combinations of heterogeneous human and nonhuman elements that form and disperse during interpreted outpatient visits to the hospital. It argues that interpreted visits are place-specific and that Maine’s accumulated immigration history and mixture of racial and ethnic relations create a particular multilingual setting for hospital care. It proposes the concept of interpreter assemblage to make sense of the transnational mixes of people, objects, and ideas that meet in the exam room. This paper analyzes medically interpreted visits to two outpatient clinics in one hospital in Maine, based on nine months of fieldwork in 2012 that included observations of 69 adult immigrant and refugee patients as well as interpreters and clinic staff, during 85 outpatient visits.

Author

• Susan E. Bell, Drexel University