A Driessen
Biographic Data
| ID | 43901 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Driessen |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Driessen |
| SIGNATURE | DRIESSEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5627-1684 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Care without co‐presence
In this article we analyze how family involvement in intensive care in the United Kingdom (UK) was reconfigured through the reordering of proximity and distance during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects thereof. The introduction of visiting restrictions disrupted established modes of involvement in intensive care, prompting family members, hospital staff and, when able, patients, to craft alternative modes of involvement. Dr…
Processes and partitions
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with palliative care teams in the UK to contrast two logics of end‐of‐life medical care: one oriented towards intervention, the other towards acceptance and accompaniment. Through a series of illustrative cases, the authors describe how each logic not only shapes what practitioners do, but how they imagine the object of their care. The article traces these contrasting practices to different conceptuali…
“It Depends on the Dirt in Question”
When people clean their bodies, clothes, or kitchens, they dirty the water. In the Netherlands, that which is technologically impossible or too costly to remove from wastewater flows out from wastewater treatment plants with the effluent, where it can harm aquatic organisms. In an attempt to grapple with household emissions, the water sector is charged with increasing awareness about these harmful effects so that people can change their behavior.…
Rethinking ‘Recovery’
INTRODUCTION: Interpretations of 'recovery' from illness are complex and influenced by many factors, not least patient expectations and experiences. This paper examines meanings of 'recovery', and how it is strived towards, drawing on the example of COVID-19 infection. METHODS: Drawing on qualitative interviews (n = 93) conducted in the UK between February 2021 and July 2022, we compare adults' accounts of being admitted to an Intensive Care Unit…
Bugbears in the Waiting Room
In 1985, Arber and Sawyer described the discretionary rationing power of general practice receptionists. Our paper revisits this territory. Much has changed in the intervening decades. Digitalisation has altered reception work. Increasing multimorbidity and rising chronic illness, combined with a dwindling workforce, restricted funding and systemic pressures on public services, have fuelled the 'crisis' in general practice. 'Unacceptable' delays …
Not intervening as a form of care
Biomedicine is organized around interventions. Despite growing concern about overtreatment in healthcare systems, not intervening can still raise questions about potential negligence and the quality of care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with palliative care teams in England, we explore the work palliative care specialists do to reduce and sometimes halt interventions for patients at the end-of-life, in a general medical environment that is lar…
Navigating uncertainties in critical care with Covid-19
Uncertainty is inherent in medicine and has been an enduring focus of enquiry in medical sociology. It is a particularly salient analytic concept in the context of a new emerging disease. Whilst a substantial body of work explores how clinicians manage uncertainty, scholarship that explores patients’ experiences and ways of managing uncertainty is less well developed. In this cross country research, we draw on two narrative interview studies with…
Multidisciplinary team meetings
Multidisciplinary team meetings are part of the everyday working life of palliative care staff. Based on ethnographic material from community and hospital palliative care teams in England, this article examines these meetings as dynamic routines. Although intended to have a prescribed format to review deaths and collect standardised information to monitor service performance, in practice, the content and conduct of the meetings were fluid, reflec…
Grieving academic grant rejections
Bidding for research funding has increasingly become a main feature of academic work from the doctoral level and beyond. Individually and collectively, the process of grant writing - from idea conceptualisation to administration - involves considerable work, including emotional work in imagining possible futures in which the project is enacted. Competition and failure in grant capture are high, yet there is little discussion about how academics e…
Doing isolation – Caring Citizens. A cross-country comparative analysis of patient experiences with isolation practices during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic
The aim of this article is to investigate isolation experiences of individuals affected by Covid-19 and explore how care practices were enacted or upheld under the particular policies of the pandemic. Conceptually we draw upon Foucault's notion of biopolitics and scholarship on ‘care practices’ and ‘carescapes’. We are interested in how theoretical ideas such as ‘containing the virus’ or ‘flattening the curve,’ as part of policies of ‘pandemic ma…
Human and Person When Life Is Fragile
In this paper, we focus on how medical staff care for people who are dying and on the increasing use of diverse technologies to ease the experience of dying. Because it is accepted patients cannot recover, the primary value to preserve life underpinning much of biomedical practice is contrasted by a commitment to make people's last period of life as fulfilling and meaningful as possible. Drawing on illustrative cases from an ethnography of pallia…
Articulating Interesting Subject Positions for People with Dementia
In this article, drawing on ethnographic research on everyday life and care for people with dementia in Dutch residential care, I argue that researchers who work with people with dementia can contribute to the enactment of "interesting subject positions," thereby enriching the ways in which life with the condition is understood. The crux, I propose, is to use "hanging out" as a method and to ask "interesting questions," an approach that enables p…
Writing our Futures Possible
Life with dementia urgently needs to be reimagined. The dominant social imaginary of dementia perpetuates a story in which people with dementia cannot have a life that is 'good'. In this Position Piece we draw from eight letters written for the Dementia Letter project, in which the letters' authors address their potential future self with dementia. We found that using the creative method of letter writing opened up possibilities for writers to fi…
Ways of ‘Being With’
Palliative care professionals often speak of the importance of forming meaningful relationships with patients and their families. Trust and rapport, usually established over extended periods of time through face-to-face interactions, and a ‘gentle honesty’ regarding end-of-life and death are key aspects of developing a sense of intimacy with people who are approaching the end of their lives. A fundamental feature of this intimacy is conveying a s…
Thinking with attachments
Much current work in Science and Technology Studies inflects knowing with care. Analyses of the ethos of objectivity, and of the practices by which objectivity is crafted, have shown that knowing and caring cannot be thought apart from each other. Using case studies from our own work we analyse how, in the sociotechnical relationships that we study, knowing and caring are entangled through 'attachments'. We appreciate - both in the sense of valui…
Placing death and dying
Over the last decade, policies in both the UK and many other countries have promoted the opportunity for patients at the end of life to be able to choose where to die. Central to this is the expectation that in most instances people would prefer to die at home, where they are more likely to feel most comfortable and less medicalised. In so doing, recording the preferred place of death and reducing the number of hospital deaths have become common …
Doing Academia Differently
130 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Laura Bisaillon, Alana Cattapan, Annelieke Driessen, Esther van Duin, Shannon Spruit, Lorena Anton, and Nancy S. Jecker Doing Academia Differently: “I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society” A great deal of harm is being done by belief in the virtuousness of work. — Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” We are committed to doing academia in particular ways, and not i…
"We come in as "the nothing
In our ethnographic study of palliative care in a UK medical setting, we concerned ourselves with instances when medical staff chose not do something, which we came to call 'noninterventions'. Such instances raised an obvious question: how does one study something that is not happening? In this Position Piece, we outline three ways in which we have tried to engage with this methodological question, from the initial grant application process to th…
Attending to difference
In the face of warnings about total institutions and growing concern about the quality of care, healthcare professionals in Western Europe and North America have increasingly been exhorted to tailor their services to individuals in their care. In this article, we invite our readers to become more interested in the kinds of differences care is being tailored to, and with what effects. Focusing on food provision for residents with dementia, we pres…
Dementia Matters
In this article, I examine building-user interactions on three dementia wards in the Netherlands. I coin the concept of “sociomaterial awareness” to articulate a collective situational sensitivity to the ways in which the built environment invites its users (professionals, but also people with dementia themselves) to act in specific ways, as well as to possibilities to adjust (elements of) the building. I argue that along with different enactment…
Learning in Collaborative Moments
In this article, we describe experiences with dialogue evenings within a research collaboration on long-term care and dementia in the Netherlands. What started as a conventional process of ‘reporting back’ to interlocutors transformed over the course of two years into learning and knowing together. We argue that learning took place in three different articulations. First, participants learnt to expand their notion of knowledge. Second, they learn…
Pleasure and Dementia
What can pleasure in the nursing home teach us about dementia and subjectivity? In this article I seek to challenge the assumption that the ‘fourth age’ involves the loss of subjectivity. In presenting dementia as a single pathway towards loss and decline, alternative pathways that provide more hopeful imaginaries become obscured. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in residential dementia care, I show how care professionals craft conditions that i…
Rethinking Old Age
This book is an important and timely contribution for those interested in the field of ageing, ranging from sociologists to nursing studies. Higgs and Gilleard argue that ‘later life’ is no longer what it used to be, setting out to examine the cultural and social past of old age and how this past continues to influence how old age is imagined and, thus, lived. Building on their extensive scholarship on the concepts of the third and fourth age, th…
Rethinking Old Age
This book is an important and timely contribution for those interested in the field of ageing, ranging from sociologists to nursing studies. Higgs and Gilleard argue that ‘later life’ is no longer what it used to be, setting out to examine the cultural and social past of old age and how this past continues to influence how old age is imagined and, thus, lived. Building on their extensive scholarship on the concepts of the third and fourth age, th…
Pleasure and Dementia
What can pleasure in the nursing home teach us about dementia and subjectivity? In this article I seek to challenge the assumption that the ‘fourth age’ involves the loss of subjectivity. In presenting dementia as a single pathway towards loss and decline, alternative pathways that provide more hopeful imaginaries become obscured. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in residential dementia care, I show how care professionals craft conditions that i…
Placing death and dying
Over the last decade, policies in both the UK and many other countries have promoted the opportunity for patients at the end of life to be able to choose where to die. Central to this is the expectation that in most instances people would prefer to die at home, where they are more likely to feel most comfortable and less medicalised. In so doing, recording the preferred place of death and reducing the number of hospital deaths have become common …
Attending to difference
In the face of warnings about total institutions and growing concern about the quality of care, healthcare professionals in Western Europe and North America have increasingly been exhorted to tailor their services to individuals in their care. In this article, we invite our readers to become more interested in the kinds of differences care is being tailored to, and with what effects. Focusing on food provision for residents with dementia, we pres…
Thinking with attachments
Much current work in Science and Technology Studies inflects knowing with care. Analyses of the ethos of objectivity, and of the practices by which objectivity is crafted, have shown that knowing and caring cannot be thought apart from each other. Using case studies from our own work we analyse how, in the sociotechnical relationships that we study, knowing and caring are entangled through 'attachments'. We appreciate - both in the sense of valui…
"We come in as "the nothing
In our ethnographic study of palliative care in a UK medical setting, we concerned ourselves with instances when medical staff chose not do something, which we came to call 'noninterventions'. Such instances raised an obvious question: how does one study something that is not happening? In this Position Piece, we outline three ways in which we have tried to engage with this methodological question, from the initial grant application process to th…
Not intervening as a form of care
Biomedicine is organized around interventions. Despite growing concern about overtreatment in healthcare systems, not intervening can still raise questions about potential negligence and the quality of care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with palliative care teams in England, we explore the work palliative care specialists do to reduce and sometimes halt interventions for patients at the end-of-life, in a general medical environment that is lar…
Dementia Matters
In this article, I examine building-user interactions on three dementia wards in the Netherlands. I coin the concept of “sociomaterial awareness” to articulate a collective situational sensitivity to the ways in which the built environment invites its users (professionals, but also people with dementia themselves) to act in specific ways, as well as to possibilities to adjust (elements of) the building. I argue that along with different enactment…
Multidisciplinary team meetings
Multidisciplinary team meetings are part of the everyday working life of palliative care staff. Based on ethnographic material from community and hospital palliative care teams in England, this article examines these meetings as dynamic routines. Although intended to have a prescribed format to review deaths and collect standardised information to monitor service performance, in practice, the content and conduct of the meetings were fluid, reflec…
Grieving academic grant rejections
Bidding for research funding has increasingly become a main feature of academic work from the doctoral level and beyond. Individually and collectively, the process of grant writing - from idea conceptualisation to administration - involves considerable work, including emotional work in imagining possible futures in which the project is enacted. Competition and failure in grant capture are high, yet there is little discussion about how academics e…
Human and Person When Life Is Fragile
In this paper, we focus on how medical staff care for people who are dying and on the increasing use of diverse technologies to ease the experience of dying. Because it is accepted patients cannot recover, the primary value to preserve life underpinning much of biomedical practice is contrasted by a commitment to make people's last period of life as fulfilling and meaningful as possible. Drawing on illustrative cases from an ethnography of pallia…
Writing our Futures Possible
Life with dementia urgently needs to be reimagined. The dominant social imaginary of dementia perpetuates a story in which people with dementia cannot have a life that is 'good'. In this Position Piece we draw from eight letters written for the Dementia Letter project, in which the letters' authors address their potential future self with dementia. We found that using the creative method of letter writing opened up possibilities for writers to fi…
Doing Academia Differently
130 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Laura Bisaillon, Alana Cattapan, Annelieke Driessen, Esther van Duin, Shannon Spruit, Lorena Anton, and Nancy S. Jecker Doing Academia Differently: “I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society” A great deal of harm is being done by belief in the virtuousness of work. — Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” We are committed to doing academia in particular ways, and not i…
Rethinking Old Age
This book is an important and timely contribution for those interested in the field of ageing, ranging from sociologists to nursing studies. Higgs and Gilleard argue that ‘later life’ is no longer what it used to be, setting out to examine the cultural and social past of old age and how this past continues to influence how old age is imagined and, thus, lived. Building on their extensive scholarship on the concepts of the third and fourth age, th…
Pleasure and Dementia
What can pleasure in the nursing home teach us about dementia and subjectivity? In this article I seek to challenge the assumption that the ‘fourth age’ involves the loss of subjectivity. In presenting dementia as a single pathway towards loss and decline, alternative pathways that provide more hopeful imaginaries become obscured. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in residential dementia care, I show how care professionals craft conditions that i…
Learning in Collaborative Moments
In this article, we describe experiences with dialogue evenings within a research collaboration on long-term care and dementia in the Netherlands. What started as a conventional process of ‘reporting back’ to interlocutors transformed over the course of two years into learning and knowing together. We argue that learning took place in three different articulations. First, participants learnt to expand their notion of knowledge. Second, they learn…
Doing Academia Differently
130 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Laura Bisaillon, Alana Cattapan, Annelieke Driessen, Esther van Duin, Shannon Spruit, Lorena Anton, and Nancy S. Jecker Doing Academia Differently: “I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society” A great deal of harm is being done by belief in the virtuousness of work. — Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” We are committed to doing academia in particular ways, and not i…
"We come in as "the nothing
In our ethnographic study of palliative care in a UK medical setting, we concerned ourselves with instances when medical staff chose not do something, which we came to call 'noninterventions'. Such instances raised an obvious question: how does one study something that is not happening? In this Position Piece, we outline three ways in which we have tried to engage with this methodological question, from the initial grant application process to th…
Attending to difference
In the face of warnings about total institutions and growing concern about the quality of care, healthcare professionals in Western Europe and North America have increasingly been exhorted to tailor their services to individuals in their care. In this article, we invite our readers to become more interested in the kinds of differences care is being tailored to, and with what effects. Focusing on food provision for residents with dementia, we pres…
Dementia Matters
In this article, I examine building-user interactions on three dementia wards in the Netherlands. I coin the concept of “sociomaterial awareness” to articulate a collective situational sensitivity to the ways in which the built environment invites its users (professionals, but also people with dementia themselves) to act in specific ways, as well as to possibilities to adjust (elements of) the building. I argue that along with different enactment…
Ways of ‘Being With’
Palliative care professionals often speak of the importance of forming meaningful relationships with patients and their families. Trust and rapport, usually established over extended periods of time through face-to-face interactions, and a ‘gentle honesty’ regarding end-of-life and death are key aspects of developing a sense of intimacy with people who are approaching the end of their lives. A fundamental feature of this intimacy is conveying a s…
Thinking with attachments
Much current work in Science and Technology Studies inflects knowing with care. Analyses of the ethos of objectivity, and of the practices by which objectivity is crafted, have shown that knowing and caring cannot be thought apart from each other. Using case studies from our own work we analyse how, in the sociotechnical relationships that we study, knowing and caring are entangled through 'attachments'. We appreciate - both in the sense of valui…
Placing death and dying
Over the last decade, policies in both the UK and many other countries have promoted the opportunity for patients at the end of life to be able to choose where to die. Central to this is the expectation that in most instances people would prefer to die at home, where they are more likely to feel most comfortable and less medicalised. In so doing, recording the preferred place of death and reducing the number of hospital deaths have become common …
Doing isolation – Caring Citizens. A cross-country comparative analysis of patient experiences with isolation practices during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic
The aim of this article is to investigate isolation experiences of individuals affected by Covid-19 and explore how care practices were enacted or upheld under the particular policies of the pandemic. Conceptually we draw upon Foucault's notion of biopolitics and scholarship on ‘care practices’ and ‘carescapes’. We are interested in how theoretical ideas such as ‘containing the virus’ or ‘flattening the curve,’ as part of policies of ‘pandemic ma…
Human and Person When Life Is Fragile
In this paper, we focus on how medical staff care for people who are dying and on the increasing use of diverse technologies to ease the experience of dying. Because it is accepted patients cannot recover, the primary value to preserve life underpinning much of biomedical practice is contrasted by a commitment to make people's last period of life as fulfilling and meaningful as possible. Drawing on illustrative cases from an ethnography of pallia…
Articulating Interesting Subject Positions for People with Dementia
In this article, drawing on ethnographic research on everyday life and care for people with dementia in Dutch residential care, I argue that researchers who work with people with dementia can contribute to the enactment of "interesting subject positions," thereby enriching the ways in which life with the condition is understood. The crux, I propose, is to use "hanging out" as a method and to ask "interesting questions," an approach that enables p…
Writing our Futures Possible
Life with dementia urgently needs to be reimagined. The dominant social imaginary of dementia perpetuates a story in which people with dementia cannot have a life that is 'good'. In this Position Piece we draw from eight letters written for the Dementia Letter project, in which the letters' authors address their potential future self with dementia. We found that using the creative method of letter writing opened up possibilities for writers to fi…
Navigating uncertainties in critical care with Covid-19
Uncertainty is inherent in medicine and has been an enduring focus of enquiry in medical sociology. It is a particularly salient analytic concept in the context of a new emerging disease. Whilst a substantial body of work explores how clinicians manage uncertainty, scholarship that explores patients’ experiences and ways of managing uncertainty is less well developed. In this cross country research, we draw on two narrative interview studies with…
Multidisciplinary team meetings
Multidisciplinary team meetings are part of the everyday working life of palliative care staff. Based on ethnographic material from community and hospital palliative care teams in England, this article examines these meetings as dynamic routines. Although intended to have a prescribed format to review deaths and collect standardised information to monitor service performance, in practice, the content and conduct of the meetings were fluid, reflec…
Grieving academic grant rejections
Bidding for research funding has increasingly become a main feature of academic work from the doctoral level and beyond. Individually and collectively, the process of grant writing - from idea conceptualisation to administration - involves considerable work, including emotional work in imagining possible futures in which the project is enacted. Competition and failure in grant capture are high, yet there is little discussion about how academics e…
“It Depends on the Dirt in Question”
When people clean their bodies, clothes, or kitchens, they dirty the water. In the Netherlands, that which is technologically impossible or too costly to remove from wastewater flows out from wastewater treatment plants with the effluent, where it can harm aquatic organisms. In an attempt to grapple with household emissions, the water sector is charged with increasing awareness about these harmful effects so that people can change their behavior.…
Rethinking ‘Recovery’
INTRODUCTION: Interpretations of 'recovery' from illness are complex and influenced by many factors, not least patient expectations and experiences. This paper examines meanings of 'recovery', and how it is strived towards, drawing on the example of COVID-19 infection. METHODS: Drawing on qualitative interviews (n = 93) conducted in the UK between February 2021 and July 2022, we compare adults' accounts of being admitted to an Intensive Care Unit…
Bugbears in the Waiting Room
In 1985, Arber and Sawyer described the discretionary rationing power of general practice receptionists. Our paper revisits this territory. Much has changed in the intervening decades. Digitalisation has altered reception work. Increasing multimorbidity and rising chronic illness, combined with a dwindling workforce, restricted funding and systemic pressures on public services, have fuelled the 'crisis' in general practice. 'Unacceptable' delays …
Not intervening as a form of care
Biomedicine is organized around interventions. Despite growing concern about overtreatment in healthcare systems, not intervening can still raise questions about potential negligence and the quality of care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with palliative care teams in England, we explore the work palliative care specialists do to reduce and sometimes halt interventions for patients at the end-of-life, in a general medical environment that is lar…
Care without co‐presence
In this article we analyze how family involvement in intensive care in the United Kingdom (UK) was reconfigured through the reordering of proximity and distance during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects thereof. The introduction of visiting restrictions disrupted established modes of involvement in intensive care, prompting family members, hospital staff and, when able, patients, to craft alternative modes of involvement. Dr…
Processes and partitions
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with palliative care teams in the UK to contrast two logics of end‐of‐life medical care: one oriented towards intervention, the other towards acceptance and accompaniment. Through a series of illustrative cases, the authors describe how each logic not only shapes what practitioners do, but how they imagine the object of their care. The article traces these contrasting practices to different conceptuali…
Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Medicine (15 works) · Political science (11 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Nursing (8 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Public relations (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works)