Liminality, the Law, and the Case of Undocumented Migration in Medicine

About the event

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 theory and socio-anthropological theory at the nexus between medicine, law, and migration. She is currently a deputy director of the Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law, and a tenured lecturer and researcher in migration medicine, transcultural psychiatry, and empirical healthcare research methods at the Sahlgrenska Academy Faculty of Medicine of the University of Gothenburg. She is also chair of the Platform for Migration, Health, and Human Rights, and principle investigator of the 'Where Medicine and Migration Control Policies Meet' project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, in collaboration between the Centre on Global Migration and the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, and Edinburgh Law School at the University of Edinburgh. 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.

This event is open to postgraduate students, staff, researchers and any affiliated partners at the Universities of Manchester, Bristol, and Edinburgh. To access this event, please ensure you use your institutional/work email address when registering.

Join postgraduate students, researchers, and academics from the University of Edinburgh’s Mason Institute, the University of Bristol’s Centre for Health, Law and Society, and the University of Manchester’s Centre for Social Ethics and Policy (CSEP) for the second in a three-part webinar series examining current issues in healthcare law and ethics.

The presentation will be immediately followed by two short responses from the University of Manchester and the University of Bristol.

There will then be discussion in which everyone is encouraged to participate.

Schedule

3.00 – 4.00: Presentation and Responses

4.00– 4.30: Q&A

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

 

Event Link

Register via Zoom