Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on procurement and consent for organ donation. Looking at the interaction among health personnel and families, my aim is to show how decision-making process about ethics strongly depends on embodied and embedded choices rather than on a priori, abstract principles

Paper long abstract:

Organ transplantation raises ethical and public dilemmas. This presentation focuses on the phase of procurement and consent. My aim is to investigate the interaction and communication among physicians, nurses and family, in particular how physicians and nurses address the family donor for consent to organ donation.

Moving away from a dualistic mind-body conception, this study aims to show how decision-making process strongly depends on embodied and embedded choices rather than on a priori, abstract and universal ethical principles. In other terms, once a relational approach to ethics has been endorsed, this presentation shows that the interaction among actors is bodily situated. Specifically, during the consent request, the interaction between the health personnel and the family is strongly affected by spatial and environmental conditions, as well as verbal and non-verbal communication. Also deserving attention is understanding how the construction of space has changed over the last few years in order to establish both effective and person-centred communications. Furthermore, this interaction is a typical case of negotiation as "invention", based on "judgement, learning and improvisation" (Massey 2005) and it deeply changes according to the following variables: the kind of death, the age of the dying person and the emotional reactions of the family.

In making this argument, I draw on the literature about organs' procurement and on my ongoing ethnographic research at the "San Giuseppe" hospital in Empoli in collaboration with the local Committee for Donation of Organs, Tissues and Cells.