EDCMA

Description

Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2019-20) at four hospitals in Canada and the United States, Composing Care traces how music therapists integrate music therapy in biomedical settings by aesthetically configuring their care as clinical. At the same time, this ethnography unpacks how music therapists’ creative approaches to care exceed a normative clinical aesthetic to remake the sensory and social worlds of biomedicine. Composing Care is concerned with the aesthetics of clinical care and specifically the tension between making care feel clinical and the meaningful more-than-clinical feelings of care that emerge in therapeutic encounters. Cultivated by music therapists, these more-than-clinical feelings of care are instrumental to making life more liveable and death more bearable in biomedical institutions. Yet such efforts to care otherwise are simultaneously conscripted into and disrupt forms of biopolitical management in the clinic—mobilized as a form of disciplinary control and biopower, while also troubling the biomedical fetishization of clinical efficacy. Through ethnographic description and analysis, Composing Care critically unpacks the complexities of therapeutic encounters, exploring anthropological questions about biomedicine, care, and personhood in the clinic.

More about our speaker

Meredith Evans is a medical anthropologist and postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a visiting scholar in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her ethnographic research is concerned with the aesthetics and politics of clinical care. Her doctoral research explored music therapists’ clinical care practices in hospitals; she has recently published an article related to this work, “The pursuit of clinical recognition: Aesthetics, care, and music therapy in North American hospitals” (2023) in Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Her current postdoctoral research investigates accessibility barriers to sexual and reproductive health care for women and transgender people with disabilities in Canada. She has also conducted research on the social and cultural dimensions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

Please note that this is an in-person event aimed at EdCMA and Social Anthropology staff and students.