Heidi Kaspar

This paper examines the notion of familiarity in live-in elder care settings and how it is challenged, changed, and reestablished. Live-in care is a strategy to prevent disruptions and preserve familiarity in enabling older persons in need of extensive care to stay at home – and thus, to enable ageing in place. This paper problematizes this strategy based on interviews with family caregivers who engaged a migrant live-in care worker in Switzerland. The key argument is that live-in care arrangements constitute an all-embracing form of inserting formal, paid-for care service delivery into the informal, private, intimate space of home. The live-in care arrangement not only challenges the familiarity of the home space, but also seems to ask for strategies of adaptation to familiarize the unfamiliar. Therefore, the introduction of live-in care is consequential for all involved parties and requires largely underestimated efforts to adapt to the new home space.

Existing research on the formation of Asian medical travel destinations has highlighted a variety of activities that attract and accommodate patients from abroad. This paper contributes to the literature by drawing insights from an Indian case study, a major transnational health-care hub in Asia that has gained little scholarly attention thus far. Using connectivity as an analytical lens, we understand medical travel destinations as a contingent product of relating, connecting and assembling. We study how connectivity is embodied and how it unfolds in care encounters at corporate hospitals in the capital of New Delhi and surrounding urban areas. The following entities are the most effectual in the networks that constitute medical travel destinations in the National Capital Region: (i) circulating narrations of personal experiences; (ii) language interpreters; and (iii) commission fees. We further elaborate on how these connectors work to link foreign patients with Indian hospitals and how they affect itineraries as well as patients and other involved actors. Finally, we suggest that the approach deployed provides a suitable framework for future research aimed at gaining a better understanding of the wider impacts of medical travel by following these connections and examining their workings at places both close and distant.

This paper is about transnational cancer care in Asia. People with terminal diseases such as cancer increasingly escape devastating prognosis of their local regimes of clinical diagnostic truth by traveling to destinations where medicine is more advanced, yet affordable for them, and hence offers a broader scope for hope. The paper suggests that transnational cancer care provides an instructive case of the enormous geographical disparities in the availability of therapies and how this, combined with economies of hope and the marketization of health care, affects patients and their family caregivers. The primary contribution of the paper is the introduction of the concept of relational subjectivities to the health mobilities literature. The findings presented proof that the concept provides a fruitful analytical lens, yielding not only fresh empirical insights but prompting re-conceptualizations of medical travel itself as hopeful, yet risky transnational acts of family care.

Die Wahrnehmung von Orten und Räumen ist naturgemäß eine subjektiv geprägte Angelegenheit. So hat eine Parkanlage für einen Passanten, eine Obdachlose, Kinder und Jugendliche eine unterschiedliche Bedeutung. Dabei laufen Wertschätzung, Vertrautheit, Identifikation als emotionale Prozesse – ähnlich wie bei der eigenen Wohnung – bei den Nutzerinnen und Nutzern auch bezogen auf „ihre“ öffentlichen Grünanlagen ab. Planung, Gestaltung und Bewirtschaftung städtischer Grün- und Parkanlagen müssen deshalb berücksichtigen, dass dieser physisch-reale, öffentliche Raum in seiner Ausgestaltung möglichst vielen sozialen Identitäten Rechnung trägt. Der Beitrag setzt diesen Anspruch in Verbindung zu den Erfordernissen einer sozialen Nachhaltigkeit, die nicht nur soziale Gerechtigkeit und Partizipation, sondern auch Wohlbefinden beinhaltet – Voraussetzung auch für ein bürgerschaftliches Engagement für die jeweils „eigenen“ Parkanlagen.

Öffentliche Parks sind ein Bestandteil der Siedlungs-und Infrastruktur. Ihnen wird zu Recht ein hohes soziales Nachhaltigkeitspotenzial zugeschrieben. Als naturnahe Grün-und Freiräume leisten sie einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Lebensqualität in urbanen Siedlungsräumen. Als ...

Although it generally doesn’t, health care can go terribly wrong. More than in any other realm, miscommunication in health care can have far-reaching, irreversible consequences. The difficulties mount when patients travel to places where very few people speak their language.

In the last few decades, an engaged and sophisticated discussion about the production of data, and power relations has developed within feminist methodology. Positionality, i.e. the set of relations constituting informants’ and researchers’ subject positions, has been widely used as an analytical tool to account for the complicated ways in which data is co-constructed in fieldwork. Based on our own experience of fieldwork, however, we argue that sexuality is underrepresented in this debate. First, reflexive writing on fieldwork has been reluctant to consider sexuality as a category in the same way, for instance, as gender or race. Second, even apparently innocuous sexualisations have a considerable effect on the constitution of data and are therefore worth including in the analysis.
In this article we examine how flirtation as a part of the participant-researcher-relation has re-shaped the research encounters in our respective research projects. We discuss the complex navigations between conflicting rationales that it entailed for us as researchers, depict the minor and major shifts in positionalities that emerge from the flirtation, and examine the reasons why we sometimes embraced flirtation and sometimes rejected it. The objective of the article is to further enrich feminist methodological writing, and to suggest to the reader the potential for including various shades of sexual performances, such as apparently harmless flirtation, into our reflections on data collection.