Materialities of Care addresses the role of material culture within health and social care encounters, including everyday objects, dress, furniture and architecture.
- Makes visible the mundane and often unnoticed aspects of material culture and attends to interrelations between materials and care in practice
- Examines material practice across a range of clinical and non-clinical spaces including hospitals, hospices, care homes, museums, domestic spaces and community spaces such as shops and tenement stairwells
- Addresses fleeting moments of care, as well as choreographed routines that order bodies and materials
- Focuses on practice and relations between materials and care as ongoing, emergent and processual
- International contributions from leading scholars draw attention to methodological approaches for capturing the material and sensory aspects of health and social care encounters
Table of Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Conceptualising ‘materialities of care’: making visible mundane material culture in health and social care contexts 1
Christina Buse, Daryl Martin and Sarah Nettleton
Materialities of mundane care and the art of holding one’s own 14
Julie Brownlie and Helen Spandler
Thinking with care infrastructures: people, devices and the home in home blood pressure monitoring 28
Kate Weiner and Catherine Will
The art and nature of health: a study of therapeutic practice in museums 41
Gemma Mangione
Exchanging implements: the micro-materialities of multidisciplinary work in the operating theatre 54
Christian Heath, Paul Luff, Marcus Sanchez-Svensson and Maxim Nicholls
Placing care: embodying architecture in hospital clinics for immigrant and refugee patients 72
Susan E. Bell
Private finance initiative hospital architecture: towards a political economy of the Royal Liverpool University Hospital 84
Paul Jones
Dressing disrupted: negotiating care through the materiality of dress in the context of dementia 97
Christina Buse and Julia Twigg
Family food practices: relationships, materiality and the everyday at the end of life 110
Julie Ellis
Becoming at home in residential care for older people: a material culture perspective 123
Melanie Lovatt
Afterword: materialities, care, ‘ordinary affects’, power and politics 136
Joanna Latimer
Index 149
