Globalizing Palliative Care? A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life

ongoing

This project will undertake a comparative and multi-scalar medical anthropological study of the globalization and cultural mediation of palliative care practices, policies, and discourses. Its central objective is to gain insight in what is universally shared and what is culturally specific in end-of-life care, by analyzing how local end-of-life care practices impact palliative care and how globally circulating discourses of palliative care are transforming local notions of death and dying. In a few decades, palliative care has become widely associated with a good death in high-income countries. Given the current international attention to expanding palliative care to the global south, in particular in relation to the notion of a human right to palliative care, it is essential that we better understand how palliative care does or does not translate across diverse cultural contexts. To this end, this project will research: 1. Why palliative care is expanding globally 2. How palliative care practices, policies and discourses are translated, adapted and reconstituted in diverse socio-cultural settings 3. How this process is impacted by culturally diverse, non-institutional practices of end-of-life care and notions of good dying The break-through scientific question that this research will address is: What is universally shared and what is culturally specific to practices of end-of-life care and notions of good dying? Building on the PI’s previous research on morality and AIDS care, this project develops a novel analytical approach that focuses on the dynamic interaction between the global mobility and articulation of palliative care discourses, national-level institutional care assemblages, and local end-of-life care trajectories. To discover how this interaction works in practice, ethnographic research will be conducted in international organizations and three countries with emerging palliative care services: Brazil, India, and Indonesia.