Human-Nonhuman Encounters in Psychiatric Care: Crossroads Between Sensory and Institutional Ethnography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-26.1.4269Keywords:
psychiatry, care, institutional ethnography, sensory ethnography, nonhuman, methodsAbstract
In this ethnographic study, I examine the intersections between human and nonhuman dimensions of care within psychiatric clinics in Switzerland. The research question was how institutional ethnography can help us understand the "hospital multiple"—a site where human and nonhuman elements converge in experiences of illness, care, and violence. Through a non-idealizing approach to caring encounters, I foreground the largely invisible experiences and marginalized perspectives within institutionalized care. Drawing on vignettes from the field, I explore insights and methodological approaches to tracing the ambivalences of care through sensory and nonhuman dimensions. I argue that sensory ethnography—specifically a focus on experiential atmospheres and collaboratively documented moving interviews—provides valuable tools for this endeavor. Institutional ethnographies of the hospital multiple open creative pathways to analyze both interlocutors' embodied knowledge and the broader power structures underpinning institutions.
Downloads
References
Acolin, Jessica (2019). Towards a clinical theory of embodiment. A model for the conceptualization and treatment of mental illness. In Helen Payne, Sabine Koch & Jennifer Tantia (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of embodied perspectives in psychotherapy approaches from dance movement and body psychotherapies (pp.40-52). New York, NY: Routledge.
Alexander, Lauren; Lyne, John Paul; Cannon, Mary & Roch, Beth Anne (2022). The importance of anthropology in psychiatry. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 39(2), 113-114.
Anderson, Ben (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77-81.
Ansdell, Gary & DeNora, Tia (2012). Musical flourishing: Community music therapy, controversy, and the cultivation of wellbeing. In Raymond MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz & Laura Mitchell (Eds.), Music, health, and wellbeing (pp.98-112). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bille, Mikkel; Bjerregaard, Peter & Sørensen, Tim Flohr (2015). Staging atmospheres: Materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between. Emotion, Space and Society, 15, 31-38.
Bisaillon, Laura (2022). Screening out: HIV testing and the Canadian immigration experience. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Böhme, Gernot (2017 [2006]). Atmospheric architectures. The aesthetics of felt spaces (ed. by A.C. Engels-Schwarzpaul). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Brannan, Matthew; Pearson, Geoff & Worthington, Frank (2007). Ethnographies of work and the work of ethnography. Ethnography, 8(4), 395-402.
Brodwin, Paul & Velpry, Livia (2014). The practice of constraint in psychiatry: Emergent forms of care and control. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 38(4), 524-526.
Codeluppi, Zoé (2019). Reconquérir la ville après un épisode psychotique: pratiques, espaces et temporalités [Reclaiming the city after a psychotic episode: Practices, spaces and temporalities]. Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l'Université de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, https://libra.unine.ch/handle/123456789/2465 [Accessed: January 7, 2025].
Deveau, Jean Louis (2008). Examining the institutional ethnographer's toolkit. Socialist Studies / Études Socialistes, 4(2), 1-20, https://doi.org/10.18740/S4F60Z [Accessed: January 10, 2025].
DeWalt, Kathleen Musante & DeWalt, Billie (2011). Participant observation: A guide for fieldworkers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Di Nicola, Vincenzo & Stoyanov, Drozdstoj (2021). Psychiatry in crisis: At the crossroads of social sciences, the humanities, and neuroscience. Cham: Springer.
Diamond, Timothy (1992). Making gray gold: Narratives of nursing home care. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Dicks, Bella; Soyinka, Bambo & Coffey, Amanda (2006). Multimodal ethnography. Qualitative Research, 6, 77-96.
Duclos, Vincent & Criado, Tomás Sánchez (2020). Care in trouble: Ecologies of support from below and beyond. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34(2), 153-173.
Duff, Cameron (2016). Atmospheres of recovery: Assemblages of health. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(1), 58-74.
Edensor, Tim & Sumartojo, Shanti (2015). Designing atmospheres: Introduction to special issue. Visual Communication, 14(3), 251-265.
Foucault, Michel (1988 [1961]). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason (transl. by R. Howard). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Fuchs, Thomas (2023). Psychiatrie als Beziehungsmedizin: ein ökologisches Paradigma. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Gesler, Wilbert M. (2003). Healing places. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Gesler, Wilbert M. & Curtis, Sarah (2007). Application of concepts of therapeutic landscapes to the design of hospitals in the UK: The example of a mental health facility in London. In Allison Williams (Ed.), Therapeutic landscapes (pp.149-164). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Gilmore, Sarah & Kenny, Kate (2015). Work-worlds colliding: Self-reflexivity, power and emotion in organizational ethnography. Human Relations, 68(1), 55-78.
Goffman, Erving (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Hänni, Anna (2023). In-patient psychiatric care as a space of ambiguity. Therapeutic encounters from a sensory and embodied perspective. Curare. Journal of Medical Anthropology, 46(1), https://curarejournal.org/ojs/index.php/cur/article/view/1745/1847 [Accessed: January 14, 2025].
Hänni, Anna (2025/Forthcoming). It takes more than one to hold complexity: Irritation and collective reflexivity in ethnographic research. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology, 31.
Hasse, Jürgen (2008). Die Stadt als Raum der Atmosphären. Zur Differenzierung von Atmosphären und Stimmungen. Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Stadtgeschichte, Stadtsoziologie, Denkmalpflege und Stadtentwicklung, 35(2), 103-116.
Howes, David & Classen, Constance (2014). Ways of sensing: Understanding the senses in society. London: Routledge.
Hummel, Cornelia & Preiswerk, Frank Andréas (2011). Le seuil. Sortir d'unité psychiatrique [The threshold: Leaving a psychiatric ward]. Tsantsa: Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Ethnologischen Gesellschaft, 16, 100-117.
Irving, Andrew (2011). Strange distance: Towards an anthropology of interior dialogue. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 25(1), 22-44.
Jenkins, Janis H. (2015). Extraordinary conditions: Culture and experience in mental illness. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Kavedžija, Iza (2021). The process of wellbeing: Conviviality, care, creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kehr, Janina (2020). For a more-than-human public health. BioSocieties, 15, 650-663, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-020-00210-8 [Accessed: January 10, 2025].
Kehr, Janina & Chabrol, Fanny (2020). The hospital multiple: Introduction. Introduction to the online-series "the hospital multiple". Somatosphere. Science, Medicine and Anthropology https://somatosphere.com/2020/hospital-multiple-introduction.html/ [Accessed: June 21, 2024].
King, Jessica (2023). Frustriertes Personal schlägt Alarm. Der Bund, January 24.
Kirner, Kimberly & Mills, Jan (2020). Introduction to ethnographic research: a guide for anthropology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kleinman, Arthur (2012). Rebalancing academic psychiatry: Why it needs to happen—and soon. British Journal of Psychiatry, 201(6), 421-422.
Kostera, Monika & Harding, Nancy (Eds.) (2021). Organizational ethnography. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Low, Kelvin E.Y. (2023). Sensory anthropology: Culture and experience in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marent, Benjamin; Henwood, Flis & Darking, Mary (2023). Participation through the lens of care: Situated accountabilities in the codesign of a digital health platform for HIV care. Social Science & Medicine, 337, 116307.
Misoch, Sabina (2015). Qualitative Interviews. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
Mol, Annemarie (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moos, Rudolf H. (1974). Manual ward atmosphere scale. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Morales, Gabriela Elisa (2020). The limits of warmth: Cultural adaptation and the politics of temperature in a Bolivian hospital. Somatosphere, https://somatosphere.com/2020/cultural-adaptation-temperature-hospital-bolivia.html/ [Accessed: October 25, 2024].
O'Loughlin, Michael (2020). Ethical loneliness in the psychiatric clinic: The manufacture of non-belonging. Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 14, 100518.
Pelto, Pertti & Pelto, Gretel (2012 [1978]. Anthropological research: The structure of inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pink, Sarah (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85-106.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María (2012). "Nothing comes without its world": Thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 197-216.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rauh, Andreas (2012). Die besondere Atmosphäre: Ästhetische Feldforschungen. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
Rees, Anke (2013). Widerspenstige Gebäude. Eine Untersuchung von Materialität, Kontroversen und Atmosphären. In Tobias Conradi, Florian Muhle & Heike Derwanz (Eds.), Strukturentstehung durch Verflechtung. Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie(n) und Automatismen (pp.93-111). Paderborn: Fink.
Richter, Marina & Hostettler, Ueli (2015). Conducting commissioned research in neoliberal academia: The conditions evaluations impose on research practice. Current Sociology, 63(4), 493-510.
Rosa, Hartmut (2023). Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Rose, Diana & Rose, Nikolas (2023). Is "another" psychiatry possible?. Psychological Medicine, 53(1), 46-54.
Smith, Dorothy E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Smith, Dorothy E. & Griffith, Alison I. (2022). Simply institutional ethnography: Creating a sociology for people. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Steinke, Ines (1999). Kriterien qualitativer Forschung: Ansätze zur Bewertung qualitativ-empirischer Sozialforschung. Weinheim: Juventa.
Stewart, Kathleen (2011). Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(3), 445-453.
Stocker, Désirée; Jäggi, Jolanda; Liechti, Lena; Schläpfer, Dawa; Németh, Philipp & Künzi, Kilian (2021). Der Einfluss der COVID-19-Pandemie auf die psychische Gesundheit der Schweizer Bevölkerung und die psychiatrisch- psychotherapeutische Versorgung in der Schweiz. Schlussbericht. Bern: Bundesamt für Gesundheit.
Sumartojo, Shanti & Pink, Sarah (2019). Atmospheres and the experiential world. New York, NY: Routledge.
Sumartojo, Shanti; Pink, Sarah; Duque, Melisa & Vaughan, Laurene (2020). Atmospheres of care in a psychiatric inpatient unit. Design for Health, 4(1), 24-42.
Sutherland, Neil; Pandeli, Jenna & Gaggiotti, Hugo (Eds.) (2022). Organizational ethnography: An experiential and practical guide. New York, NY: Routledge.
Talbot, Debra (2020). Institutional ethnography and the materiality of affect: Affective circuits as indicators of other possibilities. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 49(5), 691-709.
Taylor, Carol A. & Fairchild, Nikki (2020). Towards a posthumanist institutional ethnography: Viscous matterings and gendered bodies. Ethnography and Education, 15(4), 509-527.
Thibaud, Jean-Paul (2015). The backstage of urban ambiances: When atmospheres pervade everyday experience. Emotion, Space and Society, 15, 39-46.
Vannini, Phillip (Ed.) (2024). The Routledge international handbook of sensory ethnography. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Warren, Samantha (2008). Empirical challenges in organizational aesthetics research: Towards a sensual methodology. Organization Studies, 29(4), 559-580.
Williams, Allison (Ed.) (2007). Therapeutic landscapes. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Winchester, Margaret & McGrath, Janet (2017). Therapeutic landscapes. Anthropological perspectives on health and place. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 4(1), i-x, http://journals.ed.ac.uk/index.php/mat/article/view/4721 [Accessed: January 10, 2025]
Winz, Marc (2018). An atmospheric approach to the city-psychosis nexus. Perspectives for researching embodied urban experiences of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Ambiances. Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain, 6, 1-17, http://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/1163 [Accessed: November 27, 2024].
Winz, Marc & Söderström, Ola (2021). How environments get to the skin: Biosensory ethnography as a method for investigating the relation between psychosis and the city. BioSocieties, 16(2), 157-176.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Hänni
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
