Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on extensive firsthand experience of face-to-face meetings between patients and healthcare practitioners, Constructing Patienthood is the first book-length work dedicated to situating limited-English-speaking patients on equal footing with their interlocutors as essential partners in the process of meaning-making. Afaf Ali Nash builds on theoretical and empirical advancements in socio-medical research and language brokering to show how immigrant patients strike a balance between working cooperatively with their language brokers, or independently by overriding the language-assistance process to actuate multiple membership categories as patients, parents, and language brokerees. In doing so, they secure interactional zones that challenge the discursive asymmetries inherent in mediated doctor-patient encounters. This timely work makes it clear that impactful change in healthcare begins with successful communication.
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Interaction of Medicine and Art: Key Concepts and Theoretical Applications
Chapter 2: Ethnographic Notes: The Poetics of Collecting Language-Brokering Vignettes
Chapter 3: Patients’ Initiatives: Constructing Patienthood Cooperatively and Independently
Chapter 4: Asserting Patienthood through Expansion
Chapter 5: The Distribution of Mediated Talk: Who Talks and Who talks Next?
Chapter 6: Brokering Medical Decisions
