Home in the Hospital | Hospital in the Home

This is part of the Graveyard of Dead Abstracts project.

1.0 Research Problem / Issue

Over the last two years my research has focused on domesticity, self, and technology, culminating in my master’s thesis completed at the University of Waterloo, “Between Technological Flesh and the Technological Field”. In fall 2010, when I enter the Ph.D.2 program in architecture at _____ University, I will bring these interests specifically to the relationship between home and hospital. My doctoral research will examine both how patients attempt to domesticate otherwise anonymous healthcare environments, and conversely how they adopt medical technologies into their existing domestic environments, technologies increasingly no longer confined to centralized facilities. While I intend on researching the incorporation of medical equipment into the contemporary home in depth in subsequent years, the first year of my research, 2010-2011, for which I currently am seeking ____ support, I will devote to studying patients’ appropriative spatial responses to uniform and alienating healthcare environments. In addition to a thorough literature review, I will conduct ten months of weekly on-site interviews with patients and staff at three ____ University teaching hospitals: Montreal Children’s Hospital, the Montreal General Hospital and the Jewish General Hospital. Following the approval of the ____ Research Ethics Board (REB), I shall also conduct a parallel ten-month-long large-format photographic survey of particular hospital rooms at these same facilities in order to document subtle changes in use and decoration by different patients.

2.0 Fit with ____ Research Foci

In the same manner that wearing uniforms flattens individuality, so too do uniform environments. Whether intended to or not, standardized patient rooms participate in the production of something measurable and dissectible, notably distinct from the disorderly assemblages of our day-to-day lived experience. In a hospital the body is brought into focus as an object, no longer integrated mysteriously into an amorphic self but instead an alien body, separate and observable, prepared for inspection, penetration, modification. In my first year of doctoral research I will investigate how the uniformity of the clinical setting prepares the individual for this alienation, and also how this anonymity is resisted. How do patients cope with the “placelessness” of the hospital setting? How do patients maintain and / or create a sense of identity in the hospital? What objects do they choose to take with them from home to familiarize their environment? How do patients appropriate the space of the hospital room? How do patients relate to the alien medical apparatus that quickly become part of their intimate landscape? For instance, do they use the given names for equipment, or make up their own? All of these questions at the centre of my research fit clearly within the larger ______ project of interrogating the place of health care and its relation to technology and the body.

The human assemblage of body parts, physical apparatus, instincts, concepts, and passions, exists in a way that, as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once observed, is simply different from the way that mere things exist. In our lived experience, with our partial, embodied perception, we are not easily divided: into body, mind and soul, let alone into bones, muscles, mucous, skin, organs. In order to work effectively, medicine must draw these distinctions, must devoid the body of its mythical, its poetic, and its socio-political dimensions and reduce the human body to workable matter. Place plays a role in this reduction, and the physical setting of medicine can indeed become a ripe venue of dynamic identity-negotiation. Many patients can be observed to defiantly reject the anonymizing function of the hospital setting and by implication the reduction demanded by the efficient practice of western medicine. My research, analyzing this dynamic in spatial terms, first in healthcare facilities, then in houses, complements ______’s constellation of concerns

...