Mittwoch, 14. Dezember 2022, 17:30 - 18:30 iCal

STS Talk by Janina Kehr

The Hospital Multiple. Clinical Spaces Beyond

the Practice of Medicine.

Department of Science and Technology Studies / Seminar Room / Staircase II / 6th floor (NIG)
Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien

Vortrag


Abstract

There is much more to hospitals than the practice of medicine. Hospitals have kitchens, laundries, and cafeterias. Hospitals are buildings, situated in neighborhoods, where different communities meet. Hospitals have fences and security services, surveillance cameras and guidance schemes, parks, and parking spaces. Hospitals are equipped with waste-management systems and logistics departments with well-defined protocols for the entry and exit of people and things. Hospitals are dusty places and sterilized locations. They are warm and cold, labyrinthine and intimate. They have histories that haunt the present. In my talk, I will address hospitals as spaces and places that exceed the practice of medicine. By foregrounding the more-than-medical aspects that are folded into hospital spaces, I will be concerned with the economic, political, architectural, infrastructural, military, metabolic, and affective dimensions of hospitals, that are easily overlooked in ethnographic works when medical encounters are foregrounded.

 

About

Janina Kehr is a Professor of Medical Anthropology and Global Health at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Before she came to Vienna, she researched and taught between 2017 and 2020 as an SNSF Ambizione Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. She works and publishes on time politics, moral economics, and the environmental impact of biomedicine and public health. She is currently working on a book on Medicine in Times of Austerity in Spain, which will focus on public health infrastructures and care practices at the intersection of debt economies, government bureaucracy, and everyday experiences.

Zur Webseite der Veranstaltung


Veranstalter

Department of Science and Technology Studies


Kontakt

Karin Neumann
Institut für Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung
01427749601
sec.sts@univie.ac.at