Doing assisting - Bodily positioning in Health Care Interaction

Research output: Contribution to conference without publisher/journalConference abstract for conferenceResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Within healthcare settings we can observe various ways of "doing care" (Mol, Moser, & Pols, 2010) which is often combined with the question of best practice. At the same it is not always clear what the best practice is. This paper compares four situations from two different health care settings focussing on how the bodily positioning (Heath, 1986) of the care personals enables or limits the agency of the other participants. The two examples from the first case focus on hospital interactions in which a student nurse is supervised by a trained nurse, when caring for the patient. We show how the bodily positioning of the nurse and student either affords a nurse-patient relation or a nurse- student nurse relation as thus frame the student's agency as more or less independent. The other two examples focus on different ways of enabling a disabled person to reach products in a supermarket. It can be seen that the positioning of the caretaker either scaffold or rejects the wishes of the shopper and thus constructs or limits the person's agency. In both cases the bodily arrangements displays different ways of care taking, which cannot easily be reduced to the discussion of good or bad/ right or wrong. Even though the participants are engaged in the same practice, their embodied interactional management of the health care encounters has an impact on the construction of the participants’ relation to each other, their agency and identity. The paper is based on authentic video recorded data, analysed by means of embodied conversation analysis (Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011). We focus on the notion on professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) and show how the participants show and carry out their epistemic stance of knowledge (Heritage, 2012). References Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. Heath, C. (1986). Body movement and speech in medical interaction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 45(1), 30–52. Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (2010). Care in practice : on tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., & LeBaron, C. (2011). Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World. (J. Streeck, C. Goodwin, & C. LeBaron, Eds.). New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press
Original languageEnglish
Publication dateJul 2018
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2018
Event5th International Conference on Conversation Analysis - Loughborough University, Loughborough, United Kingdom
Duration: 11 Jul 201815 Jul 2018
Conference number: 5
http://www.icca2018.org/

Conference

Conference5th International Conference on Conversation Analysis
Number5
LocationLoughborough University
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLoughborough
Period11/07/201815/07/2018
Internet address

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Doing assisting - Bodily positioning in Health Care Interaction'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this