Design by okb-buro.comOn a fresh autumn day in 2019, under Madrid’s deep-blue sky, I went for a morning coffee with Ernesto, an infectious-disease physician working in one of Spain’s largest public university hospitals, located in the city center. At the time, I was doing fieldwork on the consequences of Spain’s austerity policies for public healthcare in Madrid. Before passing …
Since COVID-19 has come to haunt the globe, hospitals in all their guises have featured centrally in the pandemic response. As the flagships of health systems, hospitals have rapidly become the primary locus of medical care for COVID-19. They provide staff and beds for acute medical care; they can be rapidly deployed in the form of military field hospitals, mobile …
The Hospital Multiple
Explorations into how it is made, felt, improvised, envisioned and counted
Somatosphere Series
edited by Janina Kehr and Fanny Chabrol
Since COVID-19 has come to haunt the globe, hospitals of all guises have emerged as symbols of a medical response to the pandemic. Hospitals stand for intensive care for the sick; they represent professional labor and engagement; …
As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …
In “The Time that Is Left”, Giorgio Agamben sketches the problem of messianic time. He writes that the messianic is “not the end of time, but the time of the end. (…) the time that is left between time and its ending” (Agamben 2002, 2). In the following article, I want to take his reflection on messianic time as a …
A few months ago, the independent Spanish online newspaper El Diario published a cartoon entitled “Ebola in Madrid”. It showed a health worker, camouflaged in a green protection suit, wearing a white head shield and goggles, leaning over a patient almost completely hidden under the sheets of the hospital bed. The huge hospital room is deserted and empty, …