Jordan Babando // Imagine a friend of yours comes to you for relationship advice. The issue that is presented to you involves your friend’s significant other telling them they are not allowed to express emotions. Your friend is made to feel like any noticeable emotion would make their partner and anyone else around them feel…
Author: Jordan Babando
Even Superman Cries (Part 3): Encountering Death in the Hospital
“All fields have occupational hazards, and for medicine, sadness is certainly one of them… What matters is how sadness is navigated, something that is influenced by both the individual personality of the doctor and the surrounding environment.” (Ofri, 2013: 98) On my way to the hospital where I conduct my research, I was walking through…
Even Superman Cries (Part 2): Fear and Paranoia in the Mental Health Unit
Jordan Babando “He [the patient] suddenly saw me as something different, something threatening. In his eyes I was some kind of monster or devil. I was lucky to be unconscious with the first blow so that I didn’t have to feel what he did to me over the next few minutes.” ~ Hospital Nurse N…
Even Superman Cries (Part 1): Emotion Work in Medical Practice
Jordan Babando “In healthcare you have to detach and shut down emotionally to protect yourself. Until one day you become a stone. It is in that moment that you need to leave before you can no longer find yourself again.” ~ Hospital Nurse (Personal ethnographic notes, 2017) A cloudy overcast and bleak rain set the…
The Unfamiliar in Familiar Places: A Personal Account of Ethnographic Research in a Hospital
Jordan Babando “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” – Jonathan Swift There is something unsettling about maintaining a presence in a hospital setting when you are neither a patient or a health care worker. Everyone in the hospital has a specific role and ways of seeing the daily unfolding…