Bandage, Sort, and Hustle

Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering

Josh Seim (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

272 Seiten

2020
University of California Press (Verlag)
9780520300231 (ISBN)

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What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect description, but it is incomplete.

Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, sociologist Josh Seim reimagines paramedicine as a frontline institution for governing urban suffering. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle argues that the ambulance is part of a fragmented regime that is focused more on neutralizing hardships (which are disproportionately carried by poor people and people of color) than on eradicating the root causes of agony. Whether by compressing lifeless chests on the streets or by transporting the publicly intoxicated into the hospital, ambulance crews tend to handle suffering bodies near the bottom of the polarized metropolis.

Seim illustrates how this work puts crews in recurrent, and sometimes tense, contact with the emergency department nurses and police officers who share their clientele. These street-level relations, however, cannot be understood without considering the bureaucratic and capitalistic forces that control and coordinate ambulance labor from above. Beyond the ambulance, this book motivates a labor-centric model for understanding the frontline governance of down-and-out populations.

Josh Seim is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I BANDAGING BODIES: INSIDE THE AMBULANCE
1. People Work
2. Ditch Doctors and Taxi Drivers
3. Feeling the Ambulance

PART II SORTING BODIES: THE AMBULANCE BETWEEN HOSPITALS AND SQUAD CARS
4. The Fix-Up Workers
5. The Cleanup Workers
6. Burden Shuffling

PART III HUSTING BODIES: THE AMBULANCE UNDERNEATH BUREAUCRACY AND CAPITAL
7. The Barn
8. Supervision
9. Payback
Conclusion

Appendix: Notes on Data and Methods
Notes
Reference List
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	04.03.2020
Verlagsort	Berkerley
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	363 g
Themenwelt	Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Sozialpädagogik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	9780520300231 / 9780520300231
Zustand	Neuware