Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to inform you of the release of my new book:
The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency
Room
Who is to be attended first? And how should such a decision be made?
The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency
Room ethnographically explores the everyday life of one of the thickest
places in contemporary societies: the ER, where aging, economic precarity,
draconian migration laws, hospital overcrowding, and life and death,
intersect daily. The book describes the effect of those intersections for
clinicians and their patients, as well as for policy makers and the
health-care system more generally.
Mirko Pasquini shows that there is more than medical urgency at stake in
the ER, where mistrust of medical authority is fueled and violence often
sparks. He analyzes the making of urgency, that is triage, not as a neutral
medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference
through economies of attention. The Negotiation of Urgency illustrates
both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and
creative reinvention.
The book explores the stories of healthcare workers and patients and
examines the emergency room as a window on broader social changes. It
addresses long-standing public health issues such as violence against
healthcare workers, mistrust, the privatization of public health, and the
limits of medical knowledge.
The book offers innovative perspectives on the future of healthcare after
the COVID-19 pandemic (to which the conclusions are dedicated) and the
shift toward greater privatization and digitization of healthcare.
You can find it here:
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-negotiation-of-urgency/97819788362
66/
or:
https://www.amazon.com/Negotiation-Urgency-Economies-Attention-Anthropology/d
p/1978836260/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0
or in Scandinavia:
Mirko Pasquini
Assistant Professor, School of Global Studies (SGS),
University of Gothenburg
Affiliated Researcher, Centre for Medical Humanities (CMH)
Uppsala University
The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency
Room (2025) Rutgers University Press
Recent Articles:
Applied anthropology’s invisibility in Europe
(2024) Human Organization
The Sound of the Absurd: Learning to Listen in the Emergency Room
(2024) Allegra Lab
Mistrustful Dependency: Mistrust as Risk Management in an Italian Emergency
Department
(2023) Medical Anthropology
Like ticking time bombs. Improvising structural competency to ‘Defuse’
the
exploding of violence against healthcare workers in Italy.
(2023) Global Public Health
EASST's Eurograd mailing list -- eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net
Archive: https://lists.easst.net/hyperkitty/list/eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net/
Edit your delivery settings there using Account dropdown, Mailman settings.
Website: https://easst.net/easst_eurograd/
Meet us on Mastodon: https://assemblag.es/@easst
Or X: https://twitter.com/STSeasst
