Description

In this week’s episode, host Laura Haapio-Kirk is joined by Dr Annelieke Driessen (LSHM), Dr Simon Cohn (LSHM), and Dr Erica Borgstrom (Open University) to discuss their research understanding the forms of work that constitutes palliative care.

Covid-19 has pushed care, death, and dying to the forefront of many people’s minds. In this episode we talk with a research team about what it means to care, and how the understanding of care differs when thinking from a range of perspectives including from biomedical to more holistic approaches.

Today’s guests all work collaboratively on the ESRC-funded project ‘Forms of Care’which focuses on an important feature of biomedicine – that of ‘not doing’ as an active and often deliberate aspect of care.

• Dr Annelieke Driessen is a medical anthropologist and research fellow at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine/LSHTM. Annelieke researches everyday life and care for people with dementia living in nursing homes, and palliative care provision.
  
• Dr Simon Cohn is also based at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has spent his career exploring matters relating to health and medicine in high-income settings. He is interested in the construction of biomedical knowledge, its everyday practice, and how non-experts make sense of it.
  
• Dr Erica Borgstrom is a medical anthropologist and lecturer at the Open University. Erica has been researching issues around palliative and end of life care in England for over 10 years, often looking at the intersections between policy, professional practice, and people’s everyday experiences.

You can find today's guests on Twitter at @Annelie3ssen, @ericaborgstrom & @simoncohn, and the Forms of Care project tweets @formsofcare. You can also read more about the project and their research over on their project website. 

To subscribe to the Being Human Show, search for ‘Being Human’ in your preferred podcast player, or find us over onour RSS feed . This podcast is produced by Jennifer Cearns and Laura Haapio-Kirk, and edited by Antónia Gama, in partnership with the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. All rights reserved.