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Short abstract:

By presenting our untold story of developing a meta-perspective on ‘innovative’ healthcare concepts as linguistic technologies, we will reflect on the in-betweenness within this process. In between strictly regimented tasks, we carved out an uneasy space in between STS and healthcare sciences.

Long abstract:

In our ethnographies of the past years, we have—separately—focused on the uptake of three ‘innovative’ healthcare concepts: patient-centered care, vitality, and positive health. Following a chance meeting, we started developing a common meta-perspective on the tensions that arise when such ‘linguistic technologies’ (Dehue, 2023) are implemented in practice to improve healthcare. Almost incidentally, we decided to co-author an article on this topic for an important group of stakeholders in our fieldwork: health scientists and policy makers. In this article, we problematize the simplistic view of ‘implementation’ commonly held in healthcare—a view that ignores the ontological, normative (Greenhalgh et al., 2023), and relational complexities inherent to implementation processes. For two years now, we have been developing the text. Tinkering with content and form, mixing sources, trying out methodologies and genres, we are thus carving out an uneasy space in between STS and healthcare sciences. Meanwhile, we are also carving out time for these interdisciplinary reflections in between strictly regimented projects, responsibilities, and tasks. In its most recent guise, we frame our yet-untold story as a synthesis of STS insights and show our audience-to-be how a more constructive approach to implementation can be established which recognizes and furthers the circulation of various types of knowledge at play in science, policy, and practice. In our panel contribution, we will reflect on what in-betweenness means for our own work as well as for how we engage with our non-STS significant others.