Collection

Ethnography of and in Clinical Formation: Poetics and Politics of Dual Subjectivity

Submission status
Closed
The contributors to this special issue, entitled "Ethnography of and in Clinical Formation: Poetics and Politics of Dual Subjectivity," are clinicians and social scientists, critiquing the clinical spaces in which they work caring for patients. Covering a range of topics, from the socialization of medical students to the everyday violence and brutal contradictions of “jailcare,” this special issue draws on differing and sometimes antithetical perspectives from clinician-scholars and social scientists working in diverse sites, specialties, and levels of training. Methodologically, the contributors share a commitment to immersive participant-observation ethnographic methods and a theorization of witnessing and advocating for the remediation of systemic harms experienced in the United States’ de facto for-profit and fragmented healthcare system. The themes of the special issue emerge in contexts of an increasingly neoliberal corporatization of medicine, the alienation of physicians from patients, the dissolution of reproductive rights, the afterlives of social inequities exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a call for medicine to reckon with deep-seated structural racism and class inequities more seriously. This special issue embraces clinical ethnographic practice as a means of chronicling our rapidly changing era from worksites where we learn, practice, and spend much of our time. Many of the contributors engage with community-based movements that go beyond witnessing to embrace a transgressive solidarity with our “research subjects” and interlocuters—patients, activists, inmates, and community partners—to effect positive change within and beyond medicine.

Editors

  • Liza Buchbinder Liza Buchbinder , 

    Liza Buchbinder

    Center for Social Medicine and Humanities, Semel Institute, UCLA

  • Rebecca Newmark Rebecca Newmark , 

    Rebecca Newmark

    UCSF Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

  • Bonnie Wong Bonnie Wong , 

    Bonnie Wong

    Department of Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

  • Seth M. Holmes Seth M. Holmes  &

    Seth M. Holmes

    Seth M. Holmes, PhD, MD, is Chancellor’s Professor at UC Berkeley. He is Founder and Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology with UC San Francisco. He is Researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona and the ICREA Catalan Institution of Research and Advanced Study. A cultural and medical anthropologist and physician, he has worked on social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in the context of transnational im/migration, agro-food systems, and health care.

  • Philippe Bourgois Philippe Bourgois

    Philippe Bourgois

    Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology & Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities at UCLA

Articles (9 in this collection)