Citation

Sue KL. Cult. Med. Psychiatry 2022; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s11013-022-09812-2

PMID

36445550

Abstract

In this article, I describe the dilemmas of working as a physician-ethnographer within the Rikers Island jail healthcare system before and at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic in April 2020. The Rikers Island jail system in New York City has been in the national spotlight as a space of violence, trauma, and death amidst calls to decarcerate by community members and abolition advocates. This article is a personal reflection on the labor and subjectivity of healthcare providers and their positionality to multiple axes of structural and interpersonal violence while attempting to provide care in carceral institutions. I observe how COVID-19 functioned as an additional form of structural violence for incarcerated people. Clinical ethnography remains an essential tool for understanding complex social phenomena such as violence. However, physician-ethnographers working in these spaces of structural violence can have unique and conflicting constraints: tasked with providing evidence-based medicine but also simultaneously participating in an unusual form of labor that is an amalgamation of care, social suffering, and punishment. Despite and across at-times conflicting roles and obligations, I propose that these fragmented subjectivities can foment social criticism, propel advocacy toward decarceration, and produce a critically engaged dialogue between fields of anthropology and medicine toward a goal of health justice.

Language: en

Keywords

Violence; Health; COVID-19; Care; Clinician ethnography; Incarceration