Diversity, Conflict, and Recognition in Hospital Medical Practice

Abstract

The hospital is a place of encounter between health care providers, patients and family members, the healthy and the suffering, migrants and non-migrants, as well as social and cultural minorities, and majorities of various backgrounds. It is also a space where multiple conceptions of care, life, quality of life, and death are enacted, sometimes inhibiting mutual understanding between caregivers and the cared for, a scenario that in turn may provoke conflict. Through the lens of conflict, we explore in this article the theme of Otherness within the clinic, basing analysis on an ethnographic study conducted in recent years in three cosmopolitan Canadian cities. Daily practices and—on a larger scale—the social space of the clinic become material here for reflecting on recognition (and non-recognition) of the Other as actors in the clinical encounter. The examination of structural and situational conditions that contribute to the emergence of conflict offers an understanding of the diversity of values that pervade the clinic. By way of conclusion, we argue that recognition of diversity, at least on the part of practitioners, is a key condition for the emergence of a pluralist normativity in the social space of the clinic.