Human and Person when life is fragile: New relationships and inherent ambivalences in the care of dying patients

Cohn, Simon; Driessen, Annelieke and Borgstrom, Erica (2023). Human and Person when life is fragile: New relationships and inherent ambivalences in the care of dying patients. Science, Technology, & Human Values (early access).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439231155647

Abstract

Whilst there is potential for approaches that disrupt and reconfigure the human as a taken-for-granted category, they risk eclipsing the ways in which practices and values continually establish and maintain a sense of personhood. In this paper, we focus on cases concerning the care of people nearing the end of life, to contrast ideas of being human and personhood that surface as matters of concern. Drawing on our ethnography with two UK palliative care teams, we describe how these ideas can become so disentangled that they can be very divergent conceptualisations. Although the increasing incorporation of biomedical technologies to support life or ease the experience of dying can be seen as a manifestation of becoming progressively more-than-human, we describe how both patients and others around them may experience this as a process of deterioration and becoming less-than-person. We describe how these two trajectories – the expansion of humanness and contraction of personhood – sometimes operate together, but on other occasions are regarded as being contradictory. In doing so, we argue for a reaffirmation of the concept of personhood to ensure any new politics of the social is not merely defined materially, but also through the values that constitute people’s lives.

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