‘Good’ care at the hospital
My master thesis discusses practices and norms of care in the context of a public hospital in the Philippines. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explored how nurses and kin positioned themselves as ‘good’ caregivers and how ‘appropriate’ care recipients were created. I argue that ‘good’ care was produced through care by relatives as well as educative and bureaucratic/documenting care by nurses. Examining various care practices by different actors, discourses about the nursing profession and family care obligations, negotiations of responsibilities, and cases of ‘abandoned’ patients and ‘annoying’ families, I show how boundaries between the ‘medical/public’ and ‘kinship/private’ were drawn and how the state hospital and kinship co-constituted one another.
In my PhD project, I explore sociotechnical productions of knowledge and data about kinship and resultant negotiations of belonging to the state from the perspective of anthropological science and technology studies.