Medical Anthropology最新文献

"Hanging out" with one's interlocutors generates ethnographic ways to creatively involve people in health care research. This special issue focusses on people who are difficult to engage in conventional research because they are not verbally fluent, such as people with dementia or learning disabilities, or who speak a language that the researcher does not understand. In this introduction I discuss how "Hanging out" shifts the goal-orientation of research practices toward relationships and settings. Hierarchies may be shifted to provide attractive possibilities for interlocutors to participate by doing things together with the researcher. The research practice itself becomes the object of analysis.

In this article, I present how drawing offers valuable ethnographic possibilities in care settings where verbal communication is challenging. The empirical examples derive from a study where I drew in situ in dementia care units to explore what residents and staff members found important in their everyday practices. I demonstrate how experimenting with the drawing process as well as the resulting drawings enabled diverse forms of participation to see and unsee matters together with residents and staff members. Treating drawings as steppingstones, meant that inquiries could be shaped together with interlocutors and that questions could be kept open and relevant.

Anthropologists explore sequential art, particularly comics, as an accessible medium to co-produce knowledge about trauma and disability with research collaborators. However, practices of image description developed by blind scholars and artists need to be integrated into these projects to ensure visual studies are accessible. Collaborating with sighted service users of drop-in centers in Denmark, we reflect on the process of creating comics and image descriptions about their experiences with digital access, trauma, and disability. By analyzing insights from both drawing and describing images, we propose this method in medical anthropology as one way to build research collaborations that embrace disability expertise.

In this article, drawing on ethnographic research on everyday life and care for people with dementia in Dutch residential care, I argue that researchers who work with people with dementia can contribute to the enactment of "interesting subject positions," thereby enriching the ways in which life with the condition is understood. The crux, I propose, is to use "hanging out" as a method and to ask "interesting questions," an approach that enables participants to let researchers know what matters to them. Researchers, in turn, are enabled to "say more" about dementia, and to bring to light interesting subject positions.

Creatief met clowns is a creative and art-based workshop for people living with dementia that invites participants to join in a collaborative process of creating an outfit and clothing a clown. In this article, I look at what happened in workshop sessions and how this mattered to those involved, including what participants with dementia valued about the activity - by listening to what they had to say, but also by attending to their performative, creative and affective ways of engaging in Creatief met Clowns. To further articulate values that came up in practice, I analyzed my findings in terms of the quality of psychosocial relations, the role of embodiment, material aspects, and playfulness in person-centered care. By combining an ethnographic study of art-based care-practice with a value-sensitive theoretical reflection on empirical findings, my approach offers an alternative to problematic efforts to quantify the value of art in person-centered dementia care.