Palliative care services are increasingly emerging in diverse cultural settings around the globe. Given the large cultural diversity in end-of-life care practices, we ask: How do global palliative care practices translate to various cultural contexts? How do they impact local notions of death and dying? And how, in turn, do culturally diverse practices of end-of-life care shape the practice of palliative care? This project studies the globalization and cultural mediation of palliative care practices, policies and discourses. Our ethnographic research focuses on three countries that are currently building a system of professional palliative care provisions:
In Indonesia palliative care is most developed in a few large tertiary hospitals, but is currently including a growing number professional initiatives across the archipelago. Ethnographic research will focus mainly on Jakarta and Banda Aceh.
India has multiple promising palliative care programmes and initiatives, amongst others a successful community-based palliative care system in Kerala. Research for this project focuses on end-of-life care in the capital of India: New Delhi.
In Brazil, palliative care units and initiatives are concentrated in urban centers and mostly located in hospitals. The research will both take place in institutions and follow families in the home setting. Fieldwork will be carried out in the metropolitan context of Sao Paulo and smaller towns in southern Brazil.
Enduring Cancer: Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi is an ethnography of cancer in India. It presents the efforts of the urban poor in Delhi to
The 11th edition of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies conference will take place at the Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic from 7 until 10 September 2021. Globalizing Palliative Care researchers Annemarie Samuels and Hanum Atikasari will talk about End-of-Life Care in Indonesia and will outline their research plans and reflect on how their questions speak to the analysis of silence, narrative and moral personhood at the end of life.
In understanding diversity from an intersectional approach, disability is one angle that is increasingly recognized and deserves our attention. In this seminar, we will discuss and challenge the rhetoric of naturalness, and ask how boundaries between normal and abnormal, abled and disabled are being defined and contested.