Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my training as social anthropologist and architectural engineer, using drawing as methodology, I delve into the infrastructure of, on the surface, two very different hospitals; Yangon General Hospital and Darlington Memorial Hospital.

Paper long abstract:

Through two hospital campuses, one in Myanmar and one in the UK, this paper traces the social and political change in Yangon and within the NHS (and the relationship between the two) with a particular lens on energy and energy practices in a heating world. What will emerge is the hospital on the move; a building typology whose only constant is that it is in constant motion.

The paper will draw on archival material alongside the author’s three years as an architectural engineer at YGH, ethnographic fieldwork with pens and sketchbooks in 2019/20, and recent fieldwork in the northeast of the UK.

The backdrop are contemporary discussions in anthropology on the state of our world, how to continue living in our ruins, recent questions on the ethics of planning and infrastructure development, its implementation or non-implementation, alongside its implications for climate change. Considering this, the paper reaches into YGH’s and DMH’s pasts to explore issues around healthcare infrastructures in both Myanmar and the UK.

In this, I argue for a practice-based understanding of hospitals (and institutional infrastructures) beyond discourses of ”lack” and “failure”. Here, the ethnography animates past and present entanglements of buildings and patient bodies, staff, attendants and visitors, all striving for life on the hospitals' campuses.