A Time to Live and a Time to Die: Heterotopian Spatialities and Temporalities in a Pediatric Palliative Care Team

A Time to Live and a Time to Die: Heterotopian Spatialities and Temporalities in a Pediatric Palliative Care Team

Davis C S; Snider M J; King L; Shukraft A; Sonda J D; Hicks L; Irvin L

Health Communication

2019

Anthropology; Attitude to Death; child; communication; death; humans; palliative care; Parents/psychology; patient care team; pediatric hospitals; pediatrics; spatial analysis; time factors; uncertainty

The death of a child creates especially poignant feelings and extreme stress, distress, and devastation for family members and healthcare providers. In addition, serious or long-term illness forces a reconstruction of our experiences with time and space. In this paper, we report on a long-term ethnographic study of a Pediatric Palliative Care Team (PPCT). Using the concepts of spatiality and temporality; Deleuze's concepts of smooth and striated spaces; Innis's concepts of space and time biases; Foucault's concept of heterotopian space-places with multiple layers of meaning; and a related concept of heterokairoi-moments in time with multiple possibilities-we consider how the PPCT constructs and reconstructs meaning in the midst of chaos, ethical dilemmas, and heartbreaking choices.

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