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Paper short abstract

Taking as a starting point my fieldwork experience with healthcare professionals, I discuss how breathing depends on collaboration with both human and non-human beings, showing how technoscientific worlds are vitally intertwined with worlds of care.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I discuss how breathing depends on collaboration with both human and non-human beings. I take as a starting point my fieldwork experience in a clinical emergency ward, located in a large Brazilian Teaching Hospital, where I observed healthcare professionals — doctors, physiotherapists, nurses, and nursing technicians — treating patients with severe respiratory failure. From this ethnographic context, I examine how breathing is produced through the entanglement of bodies with mechanical ventilators. More specifically, I seek to show how producing, maintaining, and sustaining breath depend not only on machines and networks of oxygen but also on an immense care work that is repetitive, visceral, and often disturbing. In this sense, I aim to demonstrate that in a hospital, technoscientific worlds are vitally intertwined with worlds of care. I argue, ultimately, that what ensures breathing are vital entanglements that are always in the process of composition. They are becoming-with (Haraway, 2016) processes that rely on more-than-human collaborations that entangle bodies, machines, procedures, care, morphine, dogs, family presences, and bonds. All of these collaborations are vital; they help weave the meanings of life and death amidst the painful processes of illness.