The sensory potential of hospital materials

A seminar with Anna Harris, Maastricht University

Hospitals are nowadays often labelled as nodes of clinical waste, using excessive single-use plastics and disposables, generating mountains of rubbish. Inside hospitals however, people work with materials in many different ways. They might find new uses of objects for example rather than throw them away. They might tinker and repair objects to keep them from discard. We don’t know much about these practices because they are often “off-protocol”. In this talk I will introduce a team ethnographic approach to studying materials in hospitals and their forms of repurpose in sites around the world, including Ghana, India, Pakistan, Scotland, England, Indonesia and Antarctica.

Through selected material examples I will share some emerging ideas and our creative methods for doing research, including sensory surveys, repair cafes and experimenting with open datasets of material improvisations.

Our team consists of anthropologists, geographers, STS scholars, data experts, design researchers, medical students and makers and together one of our goals will be to expand current theories of materiality through comparative collaborative ethnography, using practices such as the repurposing of materials as ways to interrogate the sensory potential of matter and our own ethnographic research practices alongside.

Bio

Anna Harris is an anthropologist, doctor and maker. She holds a Chair as Professor of Anthropology and Medicine at Maastricht University. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded project The Upcycled Clinic, looking at creative practices in hospital environments. Her own fieldwork focuses on repurposing materials in the extreme clinical environments of Antarctica.

Recently she finished another team ethnography, the ERC funded project Making Clinical Sense, which looked at the role of technologies in medical education. A book about this project, Analogue Lessons, is forthcoming with MIT Press.