09/06/2026
Please join us on 9 September at 2:30pm in Room 101, 3647 Peel for the first SSoM seminar of the year.
Victoria-Oana Lupașcu (Université de Montréal)
Lost in the Hospital: Super-Structures and the (Un)attainability of Care
This presentation employs the concept of sickening landscapes (Qu, 2024) to think about health care and justice in contexts of ultra development. It understands hospitals as the intersection between the state and the individual and questions notions of scientific modernity, capitalist technological advancement in medicine and health care services and their alienating features when implemented, in theory, to serve underrepresented and marginalized groups of people. The presentation underscores the simultaneity of therapeutic (Dunkley 2009) and sickening (Varley and Varma, 2021) aspects found in hospitals as captured by Chinese contemporary cinematography.
The film H6 (2021) directed by Ye Ye makes visible the daily, often neglected, hurdles patients face in a large, very modern Shanghai hospital and highlights mundane aspects that constitute significant obstacles for professional, well-delivered and efficacious care. From finding the right wing in a super-hospital that offers more than fifty elevators to registering and paying at high-tech kiosks, these signs of infrastructural modernity alienate the ageing population and render services unattainable to the poor, the aging, the illiterate and the unaccompanied chronically ill.
We look forward to seeing many of you there!
