This article is part of the following series: The Hospital Multiple
Design by okb-buro.comOn a fresh autumn day in 2019, under Madrid’s deep-blue sky, I went for a morning coffee with Ernesto, an infectious-disease physician working in one of Spain’s largest public university hospitals, located in the city center. At the time, I was doing fieldwork on the consequences of Spain’s austerity policies for public healthcare in Madrid. Before passing …
For my doctoral research, I interviewed family members living with a loved one with early-onset dementia, a diagnosis that one receives under the age of 65. Jans, not his real name, was the fourth person I interviewed in April 2015. Since he lived in a remote village in the east of the Netherlands, we met at a train station to …
Attending to what makes up ‘the everyday’ has long been a challenge for scholars in the social sciences. [1] Researchers from different disciplines and perspectives have explored how mundane things matter, how ‘big issues’ sit in the small. Feminists, for example, have insisted that ‘the personal is political’, to show how patriarchal relationships are founded in the mundane ways of …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 is a careful accounting of the toll the heat wave took on those most vulnerable in the neighborhoods surrounding Paris. The book is about the shape of vulnerability and its amplification over time — in fact, Fatal Isolation requires us to pause on the ideas of risk, vulnerability, …
For some time I have wondered over the current force of the term “precarious” — less its heightened political resonance before an eroding welfare state than the sense of generational loss and betrayal that seems to swirl beneath it. I am pretty sure this latter sentiment would baffle ancestors from a long list of disparate traditions, all those concerned with …
On a recent trip to Paris, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the roof tops, always searching for the smallest windows near the top of the buildings, openings into the rooms and worlds of people who died during the 2003 European heat wave. By the numbers, 200 Parisians are expected to die at home in a given August; 900 Parisians …