Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Mirko Pasquini
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Imprint: Rutgers University Press
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9781978836273
ISBN 10: 1978836279
Pages: 196
Publication Date: 30 June 2025
Recommended Age: From 18 to 99 years
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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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 * ""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 * ""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 Information
MIRKO PASQUINI is an assistant professor at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
