Sustaining Hope Within Entangled Accompaniments: Toward an Otherwise Clinical Ethnography and Critical Social Medicine

TL;DR

This paper explores how clinical ethnography and social medicine can address power structures and inequalities in healthcare through new approaches to research and practice.

Contribution

It proposes a reimagined clinical ethnography that embraces complicity and expanded fields of action in social medicine.

Findings

Traditional clinical ethnography has limits in spaces of organized violence.

A new approach is needed that includes a 'complicity consciousness' for more liberatory care.

The authors highlight the need for expanded theorizing and accompaniment in social medicine.

Abstract

The series of papers in this special issue, “Ethnography of and in Clinical Formation: Poetics and Politics of Dual Subjectivity,” touch on several themes that are at the core of social medicine: the web of social structures and power relations that organize the risk and prematurity of disease and death, who gets care when and where, and what that care looks like and does within situated social worlds. As Levenson and Samra (this issue) describe in their contribution, social medicine turns on extending the field of medical action “beyond the clinical encounter” in order to visibilize how such encounters are “organized by wider regimes of governance and expertise, and broader geographies of care, abandonment and violence.” Writing from the “fractured habitus” as reported by Schlesinger (Doing and seeing: Cultivating a “fractured habitus” through reflexive clinician ethnography, Somatosphere, 2021) of clinician-ethnographers, the authors here witness and interrogate the nascent possibilities for more liberatory and autonomous forms of care within these otherwise determining regimes. They also expose the limits of traditional clinical ethnographic positioning through authors’ diverse participations within spaces of organized violence – indicating the need for a “new conceit” (Aboiil, this issue) of the clinical ethnographer/social medicine practitioner who is open to sitting in the trouble of a “complicity consciousness” (Sufrin, this issue) and the expanded fields of theorizing, action, and accompaniment that it makes possible.