The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland / Edition 1

by Cheryl Mattingly

Overview

Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have been diagnosed with serious chronic medical conditions. Cheryl Mattingly proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as she explores case stories in this highly readable study. Depicting the multicultural urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, this theoretically innovative study illuminates communities of care that span both clinic and family and shows how hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520267350
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/02/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Cheryl Mattingly is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Division of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She is the award-winning author of Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience and coeditor, with Linda Garro, of Narrative and Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (UC Press), among other books.

Table of Contents

Prologue
Acknowledgments

1. The Lobby
2. Narrative Matters
3. Border Trouble
4. Widening the Gap: The Creation of a Conflict Drama
5. Plotting Hope
6. Daydreaming: Captain Hook Gets Speech Therapy
7. Fleeting Hope
8. Narrative Phenomenology and the Practice of Hope

Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This work of outstanding scholarship should be a great addition to collections of medical anthropology and health studies."—Choice

Editorial Reviews

“This work of outstanding scholarship should be a great addition to collections of medical anthropology and health studies.

Choice