The built environment is divisive. (Anthony 2001; Haviland et al. 2003; Laurie M. Anderson et al. 2003; Lillie-Blanton M et al. 2000; Weisman 1994). Physically walls divide people on the inside from those on the outside, so at least in a physical way, the concept is self explanatory. And this intrinsic feature of architecture is desirable in most circumstances unless the access is limited on the basis of socially unacceptable criteria such as sex, mobility, race or culture. And there are statutes to prevent the physical environment from causing discrimination for those people who are physically or mentally disabled such as the Australian Disability Discrimination Act. (1992; Goggin and Newell 2004) Discrimination on the basis of cultural or racial difference is also illegal by means of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) and the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Act (1986), discrimination on the basis of gender is also unlawful by means of the Sex discrimination Act (1984). Despite all these statutes, discriminatory elements of the built environment still exist (Weisman 1994), and are even written into rigid design codes which form the basis for public health facility designs.
It is incumbent on all facility designers to do our best to design to embrace cultural diversity, especially in hospitals, where there is so much vulnerability. But where guidelines are insufficient, clients often respond if architects can show it's possible: so does anyone have any good case studies? Are there any great examples?
Hi Jan,
The The Hospital for Sick Children (in Toronto, Canada):
http://www.sickkids.ca
check this profile of a colleague of mine, too:
http://www.sickkids.ca/aboutsickkids/directory/people/r/anneke-rummens.html
Best,
Dan
As it happens, I will be in Toronto in a couple of weeks for the World Congress of Design and Health (I will be presenting). I will try and look her up.
I have a lot to do with social anthropologists - working as I do with healthcare around the world. Some really interesting stuff in PNG in particular, where there is only a short, but intense exposure to Western cultural mores. When I first went there, it was only 10 or 15 years after first contact. Now there is the span of the really elderly being able to remember first contact and the young adults experiencing overseas university. What a chasm hospitals must deal with?
Hi, Jan. I´m not sure if my suggestion will be appropriate for your interest, but when I read you question I immediately thought about a paper I read, called "Goffman and Globalisation: Participation Frames and the Spatial and Temporal Scaling of Migration-Connected Multilingualism." The authors are James Collins & Stef Slembrouck(2007).
Below you have the abstract and the link for download.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/education/research/ldc/publications/workingpapers/46.pdf
"In this paper we argue that migration-based multilingual language contact, and features of
multilingual engagement more generally, require concepts such as scale and scaling in order to capture the dialectic interplay between more durablefeatures of social order, in particular, the articulated temporal and spatial dimensions of any social formation, and the interactional realtime of face-to-face communication and other situated language use. We suggest that Erving Goffman’s analysis of frame, footing and participation frameworks is ideally suited as a point of departure for such an enquiry, butinsist that it is extended and developed in directions which crosscut the usual binaries of macro and micro, while insisting on the facts of inequality and hierarchy in the flux of unsettled on-the-ground practices characteristic of contemporary migration-based language contact. The paper draws on fieldwork in the USA and Belgium. We present and compare two cases: an English-support programme in a multilingual Triqui household in Upstate New York and multilingual practices in an officially-designated bilingual hospital in Brussels".
If you like the previous one, you may also like the following:
"Indexicalities of language contact in an era of globalization: Engaging John Gumperz’ legacy"
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/education/research/ldc/publications/workingpapers/48.pdf
"Globalization in the margins: toward a re-evalution of language and mobility"
https://www.academia.edu/6772025/Globalization_in_the_margins_Toward_a_re-evaluation_of_language_and_mobility._Wang_et_al._2014_
"Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalization"
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic543017.files/Transidiomatic%20Subjects/Jacquemet.pdf
Best wishes!
Wow. One of those sentences has 68 words. When editing or reviewing academic texts I have a policy of 'revising and resubmitting' anything with more than 20, and offering a stiff warning for more than 14. I'm fairly bright, and my English is quite good (I think), yet the abstract above reads as gobbledygook? Do you have a translation into English handy?
Well, concerning your comments, I have to agree that some of the sentences are long. Maybe it´s a matter of different disciplines and approaches when dealing with theoretical concepts. But, since the text is not of my own, I understand that I should not change it.
Rereading the abstract I noticed that some words got together. Sorry, I didn´t pay attention to it when I pasted it here. Maybe this could have disturbed the comprehension of the whole idea too. Sometimes, different registers (jargons) may also obscure comprehension. I´m sorry, because this wasn´t my intention either.
When I read in your question something about "multiculturally hospital" I immediately thought about multilingual spaces and about this text. It´s nice to remember that here I consider language not only as “national forms of communication”, but also as cultural repertoires, voices, and perspectives. And, in doing so, multilingual spaces may be related to multicultural places/ practices involving different social groups.
According to the abstract, the paper deals with multilingual practices in migration contexts. Moreover, it tries to analyze such practices looking at temporal and spatial dimensions using the concept of scales. For some authors, TimeSpace scales is a very useful concept to deal with micro and macro dimensions avoiding extreme dichotomies.The paper also discusses some Goffman´s concepts concerning face-to-face interactions.
The analyzed data is from two different contexts, one of them a hospital in Brussels. This hospital, as it is explained in the paper, is officially considered bilingual (French-Dutch). In practice, however, it involves multilingual, and why not multicultural, practices. But it´s important to say that the observation of a mutlilingual space does not necessary mean that all languages are equally valued. This is why the authors consider the metaphor of TimeSpace scales to analyze local differences in worthing (or not) different languages, voices, repeitoires and cultures. This is what we can see in the excerpt below from the paper.
“The point about more open-ended multilingualism became poignantly clear during one of the field visits, when Clijsters, quite by accident, learned about a list of staff names which circulates in the wards. The list gives names, telephone numbers and first and second language proficiencies. It includes Arabic, Kinyarwanda, Czech, Kirundi, Malayam, Macedonian, Spanish, Hungarian, and others. A lot of the names on the list are immigrant doctors who are employed in the hospital pharmacy and the languages listed can be related to successive waves of immigrants and refugees in smaller and greater numbers (...). The staff members on the list can be called into a ward when a particular language is in demand and interpretation is called for. So, quite removed from the gaze of the public, Brugmann hospital operates an informal in-house policy for providing multilingual resources. In many cases, the interpreters called upon offer medical knowledge in addition to proficiency in a particular language.
(...)
The practice of relying on non-Western European doctors in the pharmacy as interpreters during consultations in the wards provides one example of how North-South relations may be replayed to the level of spatial/occupational relations within the institution (the ‘central’ wards and the ‘peripheral’ pharmacy). It also underlines the inequality which follows from ‘peripheral’ qualifications competing in a ‘central’ jobs market and how this comes with an entitlement to enact one’s medical knowledge in a temporary (‘when called upon’) and peripheral role during actual consultations (...).” (Collins & Slembrouk, 2007, PP. 15-16).
So, I´m sorry if the paper or the register weren´t useful for your needs. When I suggested it I thought it could be a nice example of multilingual/multicultural hospital space.
Best wishes.
I will still look it up - your explaination is truly interesting. Being primariiy concerned by the physical aspects of perception, I know I often miss the acoustic and written aspects, even as I write about these.
Of particular interest is how multicultural competency isn't necessarily charged with equality. I speak another language better than fluently - Niugini Pisin, the main language of PNG, even my accent is perfect, but there's one thing that remains odd: it's called 'nek' in pisin - and translates roughly as cadence. I've noticed that when I speak, children in particular find this fascinating - although it's ignored by adults. I can only barely hear it myself.
What I find interesting is that the language has a range of nuances attached to it. If you are visibly from PNG (I'm confusingly not), it's better to speak English in a professional context, but if you look foreign, as I do, speaking Niugini Pisin polarises the audience according to how well you speak. If you are less than fluent, it can create friction, especially if you use common foreigner's mistakes. But if you pick up on the nuances of the language - the fun of the language, the opposite happens. Your speaking Pisin is invariably taken well, and fictional kinships from around the bond this creates. The result is that I'm mostly taken for a half-caste (half/half's are very well-respected in PNG, by the way), but there's nothing about my appearance that could possibly suggest such a thing. Curious. I guess you know much more about those kinds of dynamics than I do.
Thanks for the clarification. Again it really helps.
J
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