Dr Josephine T.V. Greenbrook, 'The Anatomy of Boundaries in Medicine: Liminality and the Law in Physicians’ Encounters with Undocumented Migration'
Location:
Quad Teaching Room
Old College
Date/time
Mon 12 May 2025
16:00-17:30
Empirical Legal Research Network x Mason Institute
The Anatomy of Boundaries in Medicine: Liminality and the Law in Physicians’ Encounters with Undocumented Migration
Legal consciousness studies have fostered limited interest in the lived experience of law in medicine. Further knowledge of how law impacts physicians and their praxis is needed, as these professionals often unknowingly serve as legal actors, gatekeeping healthcare access. The physician’s position as arbiter of rights to healthcare access demonstrates itself most acutely for people living in the legal liminality of undocumented migration. As liminal personae, the undocumented are often defined as being suspended between legal and ‘illegal’ – liminal in temporality, territory, and law. Further, biopolitical negotiations surrounding their deservingness give rise to a multitude of structural barriers, impacting their health, impeding healthcare access, and transforming them into liminal patients. In Sweden, current law explicitly relies on physicians to assess whether liminal patients are in need of care that cannot be deferred. If deemed deferrable, care is to be denied. The law has been decried as distinctly incompatible with medicine, a risk to patient safety, and inapplicable in medical praxis.
This talk presents Dr. Greenbrook's doctoral work and upcoming book, which empirically and theoretically explored this context through the lens of liminality. Founded on in-depth qualitative interviews with 46 physicians, two novel dimensions of legal consciousness theory specific to medical contexts are introduced through an abductive constructivist grounded theory analysis: legal disavowal and medicolegal anomie. Both dimensions demonstrate how understanding medicine as liminal Hinterlands and Shadowlands to the nation’s border can capture and encapsulate the lived experience of law in liminal medical encounters, informing the constitution of legal consciousness in this underexplored context. This research shows how physicians are forced to navigate the threshold between the societally commended act of medical praxis, and structurally condemned undocumentedness; a liminal space constructed and compounded by perceived ‘illegality’ in encounters. Here, the blurring of boundaries distorts both medical praxis and the law, through the physician’s response to restrictive structure. Ultimately, the findings show that when legal residency status dictates the patient’s deservingness, the weight of powerlessness in interactions transforms the physician’s medical, ethical, and legal consciousness, within and outside of the bounds of conventional medical praxis.
About the speaker
Josephine T. V. Greenbrook is a medicolegal scholar and a clinician dedicated to interweaving critical legal studies and socio-anthropological theory at the nexus between medicine, law, and migration. She is currently a research fellow in medical law and deputy director of the Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law at Edinburgh Law School, and a researcher in migration medicine and global health at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Gothenburg’s Institute of Medicine. She is also co-chair of Borders in Health, Medicine, and Society, an international interdisciplinary research platform, and principle investigator of the The Boundaries Longitudinal Study, funded by the Swedish Research Council, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, as well as the Centre on Global Migration, the Institute of Medicine, and the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, and the Centre for Sami Stadies at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway. She explores the social sciences, medicine, and the law, navigating the liminal spaces between these fields, with a specific focus on highlighting humanity, the socio-legal, and the socio-cultural (in all its complexity) in medical structures, medical identities, and the everyday medical encounter.
Organiser
Dr Gabrielle Watson, Chancellor’s Fellow and Director, Empirical Legal Research Network, gabrielle.watson@ed.ac.uk and Destiny Noble, Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law, destiny.noble@ed.ac.uk .
This event is hybrid.
Please register to attend online.
Image credit: Freepik