The Negotiation of Urgency

Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room

By Mirko Pasquini

SERIES: Medical Anthropology

Rutgers University Press

Who is to be attended first? And how should such a decision be made? The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room ethnographically explores the everyday life of one of the thickest places in contemporary societies: the ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration laws, hospital overcrowding, and life and death, intersect daily. The book describes the effect of those intersections for clinicians and their patients, as well as for policy makers and the health-care system more generally.

Mirko Pasquini shows that there is more than medical urgency at stake in the ER, where mistrust of medical authority is fueled and violence often sparks. He analyzes the making of urgency, that is triage, not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference through economies of attention. The Negotiation of Urgency illustrates both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention.

Reviews

In The Negotiation of Urgency, the hospital emergency room selectively confronts Italian lifeworlds transformed by neoliberal health policies. With remarkable insight, Pasquini details medicine's fraught economies of attention and the work it takes to enable care. Harris Solomon, author of Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma

This book is a model hospital ethnography that highlights the importance of 'economies of attention' to experiences of hospital care everywhere. Alice Street, professor of anthropology and health, University of Edinburgh

Author

MIRKO PASQUINI is an assistant professor at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Foreword by Lenore Manderson
1 Urgency at Stake
2 A Cathedral of Biomedicine
3 Triage and Economies of Attention
4 Changing Times
5 Triage at an Impasse: Making “Inappropriate Users”
6 Mistrust in the ER
7 Violence and Its Consequences
Conclusions: The Negotiation of Urgency

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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