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Paper short abstract:

This research concerns public hospitals’ practice of coping with COVID-19 in a medical plural context. I argue that COVID-19 as a state of exception reshapes the institutional carescape temporal-spatially and that the agency of medical professionals in a bounded space is correspondingly performed.

Paper long abstract:

This research concerns public hospitals’ practice of coping with COVID-19 in a medical plural context. I ask how different medical systems work in responding to emerging infectious diseases. I argue that COVID-19 as a state of exception reshapes the institutional carescape temporal-spatially and that the agency of medical professionals in a bounded space of medical pluralism is situated performed. In the first part, I start by illustrating the cooperation of a biomedical hospital and a Tibetan medical hospital in a county in the Tibet Autonomous Region to show the collaboration in the official and formal carescape in the county. In the second part, I discuss that different strategies to cope with this emerging infectious disease are deployed by the two hospitals respectively based on resource availability and pre-assumed roles their medical systems are tagged with. I examine how constantly being in the state of exception reflects on medical professionals’ everyday working and living experiences in this particular locality. I conclude by discussing the concept of “the normalization of a state of exception” and its influence on the collective health system arrangement and individual coping strategies.