Paper short abstract:

This presentation attends to the material and affective registers of pressure in organ donation. I draw on fieldwork and interviews with families and clinicians, and their personal and professional experiences around deceased organ donation during COVID to examine the fault lines and productive potentials of care in relation to life and death support.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation attends to the material and affective registers of pressure as care and crisis clash together in organ donation. I draw on Adelaide-based fieldwork and interviews with families and clinicians, and their personal and professional experiences around deceased organ donation during COVID. Pressure is a palpable and recurrent propensity in organ donation. It occurs intracranially and fatally in bodies that become brain-dead. It builds in families forced to make end of life decisions for which they are not prepared. And organ donation happens in hospitals where time and resource pressures bear down on critical care teams as they grapple with staff shortages and not enough resources. I use recent critical analyses of care to map the fault lines built into systems to reduce the burden of care, examining how pressure concentrates in some spaces and bodies more than others. And I explore alternative versions of care enacted by families and clinicians involved in organ donation and transplantation. This is a ‘promiscuous care’ (Chatzidakis et al. 2020) that is expansive and indiscriminate, and which may diffuse the force of pressure through radical interdependence.

Chatzidakis, A, Hakim, J, Litter, J. and Rottenberg, C. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.