Erica Borgstrom is a lecturer in medical anthropology and end-of-life care at the Open University. Her research examines ‘core concepts’ in palliative and end-of-life care in England, and ethnographically examines how they vary across policy, health care practice, and people’s everyday experiences with terminal illness. She is co-editor of the journal Mortality.
Simon Cohn is Professor in Medical Anthropology at LSHTM, and received his degrees from Goldsmiths College, University of London and the University of Cambridge. His previous research has focused on issues related to diagnosis, contested conditions and chronic illness in the UK and other high-income societies, and he is particularly interested in how innovative social science might provide both critical insight and influence in aspects of contemporary biomedical practice.
Annelieke Driessen’s research examines care practices and how these shape ways of living and dying in high-income countries. Annelieke obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Her thesis explores ways of living with well dementia in residential care homes in the Netherlands as they are crafted in everyday life and daily care practices on the ward. As Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Annelieke is currently conducting ethnographic research on palliative care in the UK.
In our ethnographic study of palliative care in a UK medical setting, we concerned ourselves with instances when medical staff chose not do something, which we came to call ‘noninterventions’. Such instances raised an obvious question: how does one study something that is not happening? In this Position Piece, we outline three ways in which we have tried to engage with this methodological question, from the initial grant application process to the point we are at now: first, a somewhat positivist approach, which allowed us to delineate the phenomenon of our study; second, a following technique, adopted to understand noninterventions as and when they are conceived by our informants; and third, an approach that tries to trace enactments of ‘not doing’ by mapping the range of different practices and, in so doing, elucidates how ‘not doing’ invariably occurs alongside other forms of doing. We describe what these approaches have taught us so far and reflect on the limits of each. We do so in the hope of providing others with starting points for studying nothings, ‘not doings’, and absences.
