1st Edition

Critical Ethnographic Perspectives on Medical Travel

By Cecilia Vindrola Padros Copyright 2020
    174 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    174 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    By taking an ethnographic approach to medical travel, this important book uses critical perspectives to understand inequalities in healthcare access and delivery, including gender, class and ethnicity, and explore how these are negotiated. In this key text Vindrola- Padros presents a comprehensive overview of the work carried out on this topic to date, highlights the gaps that remain and suggests strategies for enriching medical travel research in the future.

    Drawing from the author’s research on internal medical travel to access pediatric oncology treatment in Buenos Aires, Argentina and other research from across the globe, this book presents four dimensions of medical travel that can be explored through a critical (im)mobilities lens: infrastructures, differential mobility empowerments, culture and affective dimensions of care and travel. Vindrola-Padros encourages the reader to critically explore processes of medical travel by considering the structures that shape travel, individual capacities for travel, the role emotions play in decisions and experiences of movement and service delivery and the ways in which culture(s) influence both travel and care.

    This book will be important reading for scholars across medical sociology, anthropology and critical health studies.

    Chapter 1: Introduction

    Chapter 2: Critical perspectives in medical travel

    Chapter 3: Medical travel at a global scale

    Chapter 4: Medical travel at a local scale: An example of intra-national medical travel

    Chapter 5: Medical travel infrastructures

    Chapter 6: Differential medical travel experiences and possibilities

    Chapter 7: Affective journeys and the imagination

    Chapter 8: Future directions in medical travel research

    Biography

    Cecilia Vindrola-Padros is a medical anthropologist working at University College, London. Her research focuses on topics such as: embedded research, rapid qualitative research, health service reconfigurations, and the delivery of complex treatment in LMICs. She is interested in the relationship between mobility and health and has carried out research on medical travel for over 10 years.