Placing care: embodying architecture in hospital clinics for immigrant and refugee patients

Sociology of Health & Illness
Susan E Bell

Abstract

This article is part of a hospital ethnography that investigates healthcare architecture as an aspect of an increasingly large, complex, and urgent global health issue: caring for refugees and other immigrants. It argues that hospitals are nodes in transnational social networks of immigrant and refugee patients that form assemblages of human and non-human objects. These assemblages co-produce place-specific hospital care in different hospital spaces. Place-specific tensions and power dynamics arise when refugees and immigrants come into contact with these biomedical spaces. The argument is developed by analysing waiting rooms and exam rooms in two outpatient clinics in one US hospital. The article draws its analysis from 9 months of fieldwork in 2012 that included following 69 adult immigrant and refugee patients and observing their encounters with interpreters and clinic staff. Its inclusion of a transnational dimension for understanding place-specific hospital care adds conceptual and empirical depth to the study of how place matters in 21st century hospitals.

References

Nov 5, 1989·Sociology of Health & Illness·D Hughes
Mar 17, 2004·Health & Place·Wil GeslerSusan Francis
Sep 8, 2004·Social Science & Medicine·Sjaak van der Geest, Kaja Finkler
Sep 8, 2004·Social Science & Medicine·Diana Gibson
Jun 19, 2012·Social Science & Medicine·Elizabeth Bromley
Feb 17, 2015·Sociology of Health & Illness·John Gardner, Clare Williams
May 2, 2015·Sociology of Health & Illness·Daryl MartinJulia Twigg

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Citations

Jul 25, 2019·Sociology of Health & Illness·Mariana Craciun
Feb 10, 2019·Sociology of Health & Illness·Jane S VanHeuvelen
Jun 9, 2020·Sociology of Health & Illness·Dara Ivanova
Oct 28, 2019·Sociology of Health & Illness·Robin Bartram

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