Imagistic Care Mattingly, Cheryl; Gron, Lone; Stevenson, Lisa ...
09/2022
eBook
Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the ...volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique? Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty.Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte
Urban hospitals constitute an example of what is arguably the most visible site in anthropology these days-the border zone. Negotiating health care requires trafficking in tricky spaces where ...patients and their families must pay vigilant attention about when to submit, when to resist, and how to collaborate. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out over the past nine years among African American families who have children with severe illnesses and disabilities, I examine how children's popular culture operates in the fraught borderland that constitutes the urban clinic. Global icons like a Disneyfied Pocahantas can function as a lingua franca, offering a language of publicly available symbols on which families, health professionals, and children can draw to create a shared imaginative space across race and class divides and across the sometimes even more radical divide between sufferer and healer.
Based on ethnographic work among North American occupational therapists, I compare two forms of everyday clinical talk. One, "chart talk," conforms to normative conceptions of clinical rationality. ...The second, storytelling, permeates clinical discussions but has no formal status as a vehicle for clinical reasoning. I argue that both modes of discourse provide avenues for reasoning about clinical problems. However, these discourses construct very different clinical objects and different phenomena to reason about. Further, the clinical problems created through storytelling point toward a more radically distinct conception of rationality than the one underlying biomedicine as it is formally conceived. Clinical storytelling is more usefully understood as a mode of Aristotle's "practical rationality" than the technical rationality of modern (enlightenment) conceptions of reasoning.
The Lobby Cheryl Mattingly
The Paradox of Hope,
11/2010
Book Chapter
The first time I interviewed Andrena was in the main lobby of a large urban hospital. A cavernous space. Strangely dark, even formidable. Later I could see that the gloom had its comforts. A good ...place for quiet crying, or for staring into nothing. High ceilings, clusters of permanently fixed plastic chairs lined up in rows of three or four, or set together in L shapes. Chairs as neutral as could be, in tones of beige and practical brown, placed neatly on the wall-to-wall gray carpet. Some leafy potted plants (plastic too, but the realistic kind) helped divide the room
This paper examines a statistics debate among African American caregivers raising children with disabilities for insights into the work of “African American mothering.” Using ethnographic, narrative ...and discourse analyses, we delineate the work that African American mothers do—in and beyond this conversation—to cross ideological and epistemological boundaries around race and disability. Their work entails choosing to be an “I” and, in some cases, actively resisting being seen as a “they” and/or part of a collective “we” in order to chart alternative futures for themselves and their children.
It could be one of a thousand soccer fields scattered throughout the United States. Grade-school children in their uniforms running up and down the grass shouting to one another as parents cheer them ...on. An ordinary Saturday afternoon event repeated in countless American towns. Except that in the center of this field, surrounded by screaming children who fly by him, is a boy in a wheelchair propelled by another boy, and they, too, head in the direction of the ball. The boy’s father and mother stand at the sidelines watching the action. Tanya and Frank have three children, two girls
This article considers ethical dilemmas concerning the protection of confidentiality that often arise in carrying out ethnographic research. A number of problematic assumptions are highlighted that ...generally (implicitly or explicitly) guide the practice of contemporary research ethics review committees: (1) ethical rules are context free; (2) there is always an ethical 'right answer'; (3) there is an objective position from which to judge what one ought ethically to do. Notably, this is a position of emotional detachment from the situation; (4) this objectively identified ethical position can be articulated in explicit and unambiguous public language. The troublesome character of these assumptions is raised in the context of fifteen years of ethnographic research among African American families in clinical settings within the urban United States, with special attention to an ongoing relationship with one research participant the author has known for eight years. Finally the article suggests an alternative ethical framework drawn from recent philosophical work in an Aristotelian-inspired 'virtue ethics'.
Many complaints have been leveled against the idea of a first person narrative self. I mentioned some of them in chapters 1 and 2. Challenges come from several quarters. They are not only a product ...of postmodern/poststructuralist “death of the author” declarations but are also expressed by phenomenologists concerned that linking narrative so closely with a conception of the self is deeply misleading. These critiques made by scholars embracing a first person phenomenology are important to attend to in light of my own project. Two are recurrently voiced. One, a narrative self suggests too much coherence and a simple linear
Moral Tragedy Cheryl Mattingly
Moral Laboratories,
10/2014
Book Chapter
Dotty’s daughter Betsy has sickle cell anemia.¹ This genetic disease can be quite mild or, in cases like Betsy’s, it can become so severe that it precipitates medical crises that are life ...threatening. It is not the kind of illness that one can necessarily detect from a person’s physical appearance, but it can radically alter a person’s life. In Betsy’s case, it has meant repeated trips to the emergency room during acute episodes, weekly overnight stays in the hospital to receive blood transfusions, managing a host of medications, living with pain that is chronic and can become excruciating, having compromised
A key agenda of critical theorists—problematizing the moral norms of everyday life—becomes, at times, an agenda of people everywhere when confronting moral dilemmas and tasks. In earlier chapters, I ...explored a range of cultural resources parents draw upon as they struggle to create good lives, or at least the best one possible, for their children. Up until this point, my primary analytic attention has been on how to conceptualize projects of moral becoming and attempts at transformation in a “thick” way that does justice to the complexity of these endeavors. I have said comparatively less, in a cultural
