Materialities of Care: Encountering Health and Illness Through Artefacts and Architecture

Materialities of Care addresses the role of material culture within health and social care encounters, including everyday objects, dress, furniture and architecture. Studying materialities of care makes visible the mundane and often unnoticed aspects of material culture, and attends to interrelations between materials and care in practice. The chapters examine 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. The collection addresses fleeting moments of care, as well as choreographed routines that order bodies and materials. Throughout there is a focus on practice, and relations between materials and care as ongoing, emergent and processual. The contributions also draw attention to methodological approaches for capturing the material and sensory aspects of health and social care encounters.

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

Christina Buse is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Psychology at the University of York, UK. Her research interests include embodiment, ageing, dementia, material culture and design. Recent research includes the Dementia and Dress project with Julia Twigg, and the Buildings in the Making project with Sarah Nettleton, Daryl Martin and colleagues.

Daryl Martin is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, UK. His research interests are primarily located in the intersections of architecture, embodiment and health. Recent research includes a project on the use of architecture in Maggie′s Centres, an organisation which supports those with cancer, their families and friends.

Sarah Nettleton is Professor of Sociology at the University of York, UK. Her research interests include embodiment, health and sleep, the construction of medical knowledge and medical practice, and most recently the sociology of architecture in the context of health and social care.