I can’t recall the last time I went over 20 days without posting on this site. I have been neglectful. This blog seems to me now a bit like a funeral pyre wasted down to a few glowing embers. I feel as though I almost let something important slip quietly into the background of an otherwise eventful life.
I have certainly been busy. My absence from blogging coincides with a few major projects, some personal, some more professional, but all satisfyingly important and complex.
Professionally I have been traveling meeting with mid-level municipal managers engaging in what the technocratic in-crowd like to call “capacity mapping” with the intent of seeking out possibilities for linking local and regional public health initiatives. My role so far is primarily as a liaison between “stakeholders”, field experts and officials while laying down schedules and procedures for communication and project management teams. The overarching goal is to design and develop more affective assemblages of community health between individuals, groups, ecosystems, institutions, governments and non-human materials.
A few key questions we have been asking are: what constitutes healthy and fair public health ecologies? What associations, practices, discourses and/or technological initiatives need to be advanced in order to more positively affect the health of the wider social field? And what can be done or augmented (on various levels) to shift particular public health regimes towards facilitating or nurturing human and non-human flourishing? These interests have always been at the core of my professional AND theoretical work. And the actual duties entailed keep me very busy.
Outside of all that, I have begun a major retrofit (eco-fit) and renovation of a home I just recently purchased and moved into. Anyone who has done home renovations and construction will know what I am talking about when I say that this project alone requires much of my non-salaried waking hours. Although not at all inclined to the skills required to deconstruct and reconstruct a human domicile, I have eagerly taken up the opportunity to learn more about the intricacies of the electrical, plumbing, venting and structural composition of a (post)modern house.
Both projects, fortuitously, can be brought into focus using a few terms I will be posting much more about in the future: infrastructure and praxis. Also, both projects have, interestingly, brought me back to reading Heidegger.
I’ll talk more about that soon enough, but for now I want to let readers know that blog activity will begin to increase again very soon as I will be posting several thoughts on the relationship between building, coping, ecology, space, place and human knowledge. It is time to fan those flames.
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9 comments:
Good luck with it all! Miss you!
@PI, yeah indeed!
@PC, thanks you. (not start blogging again or i'll throw a tantrum...) How's the book coming along?
if you haven't already check out annemarie mol's work on healthcare systems and care ethics.
-dmf
i have encountered Mol before. Her (ANT inspired) considerations of networks resonates with me. Although her focus on more of the 'clinical' aspects doesn't necessarily translate well into the kind of systems designing and broad capacity building approach that I need to take.
thanks for the tip though, i had forgotten all about Mol and her work...
I hear what you're saying about the scale of the work but without "patient compliance" there isn't much hope for broader programming and the current model of patients as consumers/clients is a sinkhole.
-dmf
dmf,
That's an interesting point. One way to answer it is to say that is exactly why they hired me. My academic background is in anthropology so I have training in ethnographic methods (interviews, etc), which come in handy when trying to get an understanding of what "patient compliance", "consumer experience" and barriers to systems access actually looks, feels and is like in situ.
Issues of scale, as you indicate, as crucial; as are issues of specificity. Designing "systems" that appreciate and enrich their components and their interactions with other systems at all scales and of all kinds requires a commitment to the specific properties of things, the particular relationships which obtain and the dynamic flows explicitly involved - simultaneously.
Of course, getting a complete cartography of social ecologies that is sensitive to all scales and influences is quite literally impossible (since we humans are inside the systems we’re seeking to map here), but the goal should be, or at least is for me is to create ‘maps’ that induce us to think, act and create in ways that enrich and support the actual ‘territories’ we inhabit. ‘
In other words, and in my case, the descriptions, procedures, policies and practices (maps) need to approximate enough truth about specific people, ecosystems, cultures and political dynamics to be efficacious in creating better public health systems (territories).
You also write, “the current model of patients as consumers/clients is a sinkhole.” Absolutely. Even worse it is a violent rejection of qualities (properties) that are vital to the realities that we are supposed to be supporting. In my work (and on my project teams) I have made it explicitly clear that I will not engage, use or apply the “corporatist” model on any level (including finance) for any purpose and under any circumstances. Even seemingly innocent questions about patient “buy in” are rejected and reframed. I have even taught a course at the local community college exploring new paradigms for health related practitioners (social workers, disability managers, vocational rehabilitators, etc).
Do you have any thoughts on what a post-capitalist model of public health might look like?
M.
dmf,
also thanks for linking Protevi's new paper on social cognition over at Levi's site - I read it today and will be bringing ideas from it into work tomorrow.
M.
M, I'm a psychiatric social worker (have a doc in medical humanities focusing on phenomenology/ethnography/pragmatist-care-ethics) and have done consulting work with hospitals, non-profits, religious/community groups, on both increasing access to existing health-care and on trying to rethink/reorganize community/communal health.
I don't have an alternative general model/schema to offer but certainly getting away from after the fact fee for service and emphasizing the interactive/mutual aspects of quality care (thus Mol) is a good start as it builds on perspicuous reminders of existing work. I'm excited to see the OOO folks embracing Sparrow and 4EA as there are important links there if we can just get over the policing of "correlationalism"and keep fallibilism in mind.
http://www.protevi.com/john/Deleuze_Wexler.pdf
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415453431/
DMF: I'm a psychiatric social worker (have a doc in medical humanities focusing on phenomenology/ethnography/pragmatist-care-ethics) and have done consulting work with hospitals, non-profits, religious/community groups, on both increasing access to existing health-care and on trying to rethink/reorganize community/communal health.
MICHAEL: Minus the doctorate it seems you and I have walked a very similar path. I’m glad to know. My background is in medical and environmental anthropology with a focus on health-seeking behaviors, adaptation studies (marginal populations, refugees, etc.) and the political ecology. After leaving grad school I pursued a non-academic path which first led me into social work and additional training in individual counseling and group facilitation, then social service program design/implementation and eventually into applied ethnography, public health and community development practice.
DMF: I don't have an alternative general model/schema to offer but certainly getting away from after the fact fee for service and emphasizing the interactive/mutual aspects of quality care (thus Mol) is a good start as it builds on perspicuous reminders of existing work.
MICHAEL: Agreed. Today’s post on the main page is my contribution to this part of our discussion. The place to start, for me, is with ontography: inquiries into the most rudimentary “infrastructure” of Being and social life. The sociocultural apparatus from which our current health systems emerge and are extensions from is fundamentally flawed (as evidenced by the various “environmental”, political and existential crises within the contemporary landscape) and must be rethought and redesigned from the bottom-up. Only then can we hope to make better choices and augment our vision for community life and the scope of our collective projects.
Speculative Realism is certain kind of strange attractor which, when confronted, helps me adopt a mutational vantage from which to ask key questions.
DMF: I'm excited to see the OOO folks embracing Sparrow and 4EA as there are important links there if we can just get over the policing of "correlationalism" and keep fallibilism in mind.
MICHAEL: I agree (again). Sparrow’s emanational-aesthetic thinking is a refreshing move into a deeper, more sensual ontology. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it, and to find out if OOO will colonize his thinking in unexpected ways. Personally, I hope Tom steers clear of objectological framings and develops his own rhetorical position – one that continues to honor the sensuality and fleshy depths of things.
As for correlationism, I agree with many of the SR folks that any ontological project must reckon with the dilemma of possible thinking beyond the mind-world correlate. My opinion is that it is a serious epistemological problem – but one resolvable through an appreciation of corporeality and raw experience. I guess you could say i’m a brute realist of the speculative variety (as opposed to the naïve realism).
PS- Where is your website again? I can’t recall where you blog?
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