ENDofLIFE
Globalizing Palliative Care? A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life.
The main aim of this project is to understand what is universally shared and what is culturally specific in end-of-life care, analyzing how local end-of-life care practices impact palliative care and how globally circulating palliative care discourses transform local notions of death and dying. In just a few decades, palliative care has become widely associated with a good death in high-income countries. Given the current international focus on extending palliative care to the Global South, it is essential to better understand how such care is or is not translated in various cultural contexts. This project develops a new analytical approach that focuses on the dynamic interplay between the global mobility and articulation of palliative care discourses, national-level institutional care assemblages and local trajectories of end-of-life care. To discover how this interplay works in practice, ethnographic research will be conducted in international organizations and in three countries with emerging palliative care services: Brazil, India and Indonesia.