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Accepted Paper:
Materializing the future in emerging healthcare infrastructures in Brazil
Natashe Lemos Dekker
(Leiden University)
This paper explores the potentialities and uncertainties of makeshift practices through which an urban community health centre in Brazil seeks to materialize an envisioned infrastructural hub for the provision of palliative and end-of-life care.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, I reflect on the practices, envisioned futures, and materialities of an urban community health care centre. Located in an old and partly derelict wool factory, the centre is in the midst of constructing a new hospice building. By creating the material infrastructures to facilitate its services, the centre aspires to become a regional hub for palliative and humane end-of-life care, thereby addressing the problem of unequal access to health care. In this paper, I explore how the everyday health care provided amidst the concrete frame of a hospice-to-be, relates to creative practices through which the community appropriates the space. By realizing physical marks and structures, it establishes its undeniable presence in the present and projects itself into the future. In exposing this dynamic, I demonstrate on the one hand the potentiality of these practices, whereby the envisioned future (the aspired care infrastructure) is continuously constructed through early materializations of it. On the other hand, I reflect on the uncertainties inherent in this hopeful projection, as its realization is also dependent on political relations and the acquisition of funding. As the initiative is manifested in unfinished structures, its materiality becomes enmeshed with moral claims, ideologies, and aspirations, whereby the present seems to form an in-between moment, oriented towards what it should eventually become.