The Upcycled Clinic: A global ethnography of material creativity in contemporary medicine

Introduction

As the world wades through Covid-19 pandemic debris, it becomes harder to ignore that medicine is a distinctly wasteful enterprise. Hospitals in particular have become nodes of disposability.

Problem Statement

Solutions to this problem have to date attracted mostly the attention of medical technology companies promoting circular economies, a model still reliant on production and technological innovation. The Upcycled Clinic takes a different direction.

Project Focus

This ethnographic project focuses on creative practices such as repurposing in the clinic, involving making the most of existing materials. Five sub-projects have been carefully selected with illuminating examples around the world including:

1. Antarctica
2. Ghana
3. The Netherlands
4. The U.S.
5. The U.K.

Methodology

A team of ethnographers will conduct fieldwork and interviews with a range of actors, many often overlooked, such as cleaners and laundry staff, and look at open datasets of pandemic improvisations.

Objectives

The overarching objective is, through comparison, to better understand conditions which cultivate and curtail creative material engagement in the clinic. This inventive and timely contribution to the social study of medicine will advance the field in at least three directions:

1. By attending more closely to materials, it moves hospital ethnographies beyond the current focus on the patient encounter.
2. It will offer the first globally oriented study of improvisation in the clinic.
3. It breaks new methodological ground in the social sciences by developing novel ways of reusing and sharing research material in ethnography that adopts sensory methods and rethinks data waste.

Contributions

These contributions from the rich case of the clinic will add empirical insights to theories of materiality and help address longstanding questions regarding resilience and innovation in the workplace.

Practical Implications

Practically, the study will articulate conditions under which healthcare can leverage creativity and pay better attention to local solutions to wastefulness and shortage.