Meaning, harm, and responsibility: a critical sociological account of feeling and working in healthcare

Dr. Ariel Ducey

Ariel is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Calgary. Her research centers on issues of responsibility, ethicality, knowledge, and emotions in the institutions and practices of health care and medicine. Her book, Never Good Enough (Cornell 2009), examined the emergence of a billion-dollar industry for training, upgrading, and multiskilling frontline health care workers, mostly women, in New York City hospitals, in response to widespread neoliberal restructuring of the health care sector. She has also published two ground-breaking book chapters on affective and caring labour. Currently, she is completing a collaborative, qualitative research project about values and practices in pelvic floor surgery and their impact on women’s health. Ariel now also leads a new transdisciplinary project (funded by the tri-council New Frontiers in Research Fund) with colleagues in Family Medicine and Learning Sciences, on the medical sensorium – how it is configured, how technology is part of it, and how to document, model, and denaturalize it. In October 2021, the team for this project (criticaldatasense.com) created and mounted a free, public, interactive modelling installation at Canmore artsPlace, called Moral Horizons of Pain.