Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands - Somatosphere
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
http://somatosphere.net/2019/searching-studying-and-doing-sociology-in-t
he-medico-legal-borderlands.html/
Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the
Medico-Legal Borderlands
2019-03-29 05:00:59
By Laura Bisaillon and Chris Sanders
Medico-legal borderlands?
What is this nebulous sounding compound concept, “medico-legal
borderlands”? How has it been used by social scientists whose
ethnographic studies scratch at itches in the intersecting areas of human
health and illness and the organization and production of health care
systems?
Through a collection of four essays curated for this Somatosphere series,
we invite readers to join us in answering these questions by experimenting
with this conceptual framework. In doing so, we hope to highlight the
valuable and original ways that using “medico-legal borderlands” can
assist in studying the social.
Our understanding and application of “medico-legal borderlands” have as
their point of departure the scholarly contributions of the sociologist duo,
Stefan Timmermans and Jonathan Gabe (2002). According to
Timmermans and Gabe, the concept refers to spaces of professional
practice where the institutions of law and policy, medicine and health care,
and social services exist side-by-side and overlap. In using “medico-legal
borderlands” as an analytic, we aim to harness close, ethnographic
attention to what happens in these various sites. Accordingly, we ask:
what might such close attention to these spaces reveal, and what are the
implications of these revelations for people and health systems? We
suggest that inquiries within medico-legal borderlands’ spaces and places
illuminate the presence and functioning of underexplored and frequently
taken-for-granted forms of social control and governance, policy and
practice, communication and discourse, and subjectivity and lived
experience.
In our work as sociologists, the medico-legal borderlands concept has
been, and continues to be, a beneficial way to organize and carry out
social studies. Using this conceptual framework has been not only
intellectually engaging, but empirically fruitful: we have applied this lens
separately, within our respective research agendas, and jointly, for our
page 1 / 6Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
collaborations together (see Sanders and Bisaillon, 2018). Our desire to
further explore the possibilities that the borderlands concept makes
possible led us to cooperatively convene a panel titled “Bodies and
Practices in the Medico-Legal Borderlands” at the 2018 Law and Society
Association meeting in Toronto.
The response to our call for papers was, in a word, effervescent. Each
contributor took up the medico-legal borderlands lens to bring forth
analyses with equal measures of criticality and creativity. What we
generated together were ideas strong and interesting precisely because
they were held up together. And so, we offer this series.
The four essays assembled in this “Searching, Studying and Doing
Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands” section benefited immensely
from interactions with audience members. Our work also was enhanced as
we later re-engaged with one another’s ideas in the ensuing months. As
readers will see, we have also engaged with Timmermans and Gabe’s
concept of medico-legal borderlands in ways that made sense and were
meaningful within the social contexts of our ethnographic field studies.
It is our hope that readers will find what follows illuminating as well as
probingly provocative.
“Bodies and Practices in the Medico-Legal Borderlands” panel at the
2018 Law and Society Association meeting in Toronto.
Essays
In the leading piece, “Exclusion and gatekeeping in psychiatric-legal
borderland: Keeping the material in view,” Dr. Agnieszka Doll (McGill
University, Montreal) draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Polish psychiatric
hospitals and courts to look at porosity and gatekeeping where medical
and legal forms of knowledge intersect. Through the example of a lawyer
accessing his client’s medical files in a psychiatric hospital, Doll shows
how certain forms of knowledge are used when people are involuntarily
admitted to the emergency ward, while other knowledges are not.
page 2 / 6Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
Monitoring, gatekeeping, and restricting access happen because
psychiatric and legal professionals, using various material artifacts and
spaces, are involved. As we see, actors interact to re-interpret how
medical knowledge is produced in the courtroom.
Dr. Eli Manning (Dalhousie University, Halifax) begins “Why we must go
beyond focusing on the ‘overrepresentation’ of racialized people in HIV
criminalization” with findings from a report that documents how racialized
immigrant men are overrepresented in mainstream newspaper reports of
HIV non-disclosure in Canada (Mykhalovskiy et al., 2016). Manning
argues that this problem of overrepresentation by journalists and media
outlets stands as a symptom around which to build social inquiry. And
further, that such inquiry is vital if we are to capture and also act on
harmful side effects of how racism, health status, and criminalization
processes co-constitute. Manning makes the case that social analysts
need to focus on the institutionally organized conditions that drive racist
practices which, she posits, sit at the heart of the criminalization of
non-disclosure of HIV positive status in Canada.
In “Queer Zones: Refugees from Africa and Interactions with Canada’s
Borderlands,” Notisha Massaquoi (University of Toronto) exercises her
insider position within community-level queer African refugee milieus in
Toronto to problematize how the Canadian immigration system reads and
interprets these bodies within certain institutional spaces. Specifically, she
examines the national border as an international frontier, and the refugee
adjudication hearing as spaces in which particular ways of knowing
emerge. Massaquoi discusses the consequences of these ways of
knowing for queer African bodies and the state, while also identifying them
as ideological practices. Her ethnographic explorations illuminate how
notions of personal and political borders are being challenged and
reworked by the different social actors, be they individual refugees or
institutional representatives. Further, she demonstrates how these
activities, in turn, have implications for the health and wellbeing of refugee
claimants.
In the final essay, “ Scholarly Stretching and Meta-Ethnography in the
Medico-Legal Borderlands,” medical sociologist, Chris Sanders (Lakehead
University, Thunder Bay), and sociologist of health and illness, Laura
Bisaillon (University of Toronto), put into play a methodological strategy
called meta-ethnography to bring their separate studies into dialogue
(Sanders & Bisaillon, 2018). Through this strategy, Sanders and Bisaillon
offer novel insights about how medical doctors and public health nurses
carry out their work. In particular, they demonstrate how in such work there
arise problems of an ethical and professional order with implications for
people who present for care. By synthesizing their respective ethnographic
findings, Sanders and Bisaillon are able to show how and with what
page 3 / 6Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
implications professional practices come to be shaped to serve state,
rather than patient, interests.
Ultimately, we see this series as an invitation to contemplate problematics
in everyday life, big and small, manifest and latent, that occur as a result
of law and policy, medical and health care practice, and social services
enactments and practices. In one way or another, these arrangements
have bearing on all of our lives. We hope that Somatosphere readers find
the analyses in medico-legal borderlands showcased through these
essays as thought-provoking as they are diverse.
Panel participants (from L to R): Laura Bisaillon, Notisha Massaquoi, Eli Manning, Agnieska Doll, Austin Jenkins, Chris Sanders
Works Cited
Mykhalovskiy, E., Hastings, C., Sanders, C., Hayman, M., & Bisaillon, L.
(2016). ‘Callous, Cold and Deliberately Duplicitous’: Racialization,
Immigration and the Representation of HIV Criminalization in Canadian
Mainstream Media. Report funded by the CIHR Social Research Centre
for HIV Prevention.
Sanders, C., & Bisaillon, L. (2018). When Health Care is Displaced by
State Interests: Building Dialogue through Shared Findings. Qualitative
Health Research, 29(1), 32-41.
page 4 / 6Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
Timmermans, S., & Gabe, J. (2002). Introduction: Connecting Criminology
and Sociology of
Health and Illness. Sociology of Health & Illness, 24(5), 501-516.
Chris Sanders, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lakehead
University in Ontario. I’m a medical sociologist specializing in the areas of
public health and mental health& illness. My work focuses on disease
prevention policy and health care provider practices in Canada and the
United States. I am particularly interested in rural sociology and the use of
qualitative methods.
Laura Bisaillon, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. I
am a sociologist of health and illness specializing in qualitative methods
and the social studies of HIV-related policy and Canadian immigration law.
I use the social organization of knowledge approach and institutional
ethnography as forms of inquiry. The bulk of my work has explored
immigration medical inadmissibility decision-making and its consequences.
“Screening and Screaming in Exile: Medical Examination and the
Immigration Health Work of People with HIV” is my monograph under
review with UBC Press. Since 2013, I have conducted ethnographic
fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran and Romania.
AMA citation
Bisaillon L, Sanders C. Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the
Medico-Legal Borderlands. Somatosphere. 2019. Available at: http://somat
osphere.net/2019/searching-studying-and-doing-sociology-in-the-medico-l
egal-borderlands.html/. Accessed March 29, 2019.
APA citation
Bisaillon, Laura & Sanders, Chris. (2019). Searching, Studying and Doing
Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands. Retrieved March 29, 2019,
from Somatosphere Web site: http://somatosphere.net/2019/searching-stu
dying-and-doing-sociology-in-the-medico-legal-borderlands.html/
Chicago citation
Bisaillon, Laura and Chris Sanders. 2019. Searching, Studying and Doing
Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands. Somatosphere. http://somatos
phere.net/2019/searching-studying-and-doing-sociology-in-the-medico-leg
al-borderlands.html/ (accessed March 29, 2019).
Harvard citation
Bisaillon, L & Sanders, C 2019, Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology
in the Medico-Legal Borderlands, Somatosphere. Retrieved March 29,
2019, fromScience, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
ociology-in-the-medico-legal-borderlands.html/>
MLA citation
Bisaillon, Laura and Chris Sanders. "Searching, Studying and Doing
Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands." 29 Mar. 2019. Somatosphere
. Accessed 29 Mar. 2019.
page 6 / 6
Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)You can also read
