•  60
    Washing the patient: dignity and aesthetic values in nursing care
    Nursing Philosophy 14 (3): 186-200. 2013.
    Dignity is a fundamental concept, but its meaning is not clear. This paper attempts to clarify the term by analysing and reconnecting two meanings of dignity: humanitas and dignitas. Humanitas refers to citizen values that protect individuals as equal to one another. Dignitas refers to aesthetic values embedded in genres of sociality that relate to differences between people. The paper explores these values by way of an empirical ethical analysis of practices of washing psychiatric patients in n…Read more
  •  58
    Understanding Palliative Cancer Chemotherapy: About Shared Decisions and Shared Trajectories
    with Susanne J. de Kort, Dick J. Richel, Nelleke Koedoot, and Dick L. Willems
    Health Care Analysis 18 (2): 164-174. 2010.
    Most models of patient-physician communication take decision-making as a central concept. However, we found that often the treatment course of metastatic cancer patients is not easy to describe in straightforward terms used in decision-making models but is instead frequently more erratic. Our aim was to analyse these processes as trajectories. We used a longitudinal case study of 13 patients with metastatic colorectal and pancreatic cancer for whom palliative chemotherapy was a treatment option,…Read more
  •  54
    Politiek nieuwe stijl
    Krisis 7 (1): 80-85. 2006.
  •  38
    The Heart of the Matter. About Good Nursing and Telecare
    Health Care Analysis 18 (4): 374. 2010.
    Nurses and ethicists worry that the implementation of care at a distance or telecare will impoverish patient care by taking out ‘the heart’ of the clinical work. This means that telecare is feared to induce the neglect of patients, and to possibly hinder the development of a personal relation between nurse and patient. This study aims to analyse whether these worries are warranted by analysing Dutch care practices using telemonitoring in care for chronic patients in the Netherlands. How do clini…Read more
  •  36
    How to Make Your Relationship Work? Aesthetic Relations with Technology
    Foundations of Science 22 (2): 421-424. 2017.
    Discussing the workings of technology in care as aesthetic rather than as ethical or epistemological interventions focusses on how technologies engage in and change relations between those involved. Such an aesthetic study opens up a repertoire to address values that are abundant in care, but are as yet hardly theorized. Kamphof studies the problem that sensor technology reveals things about the elderly patients without the patients being aware of this. I suggest improvement of these relations m…Read more
  •  28
    Knowing Patients: Turning Patient Knowledge into Science
    Science, Technology, and Human Values 39 (1): 73-97. 2014.
    Science and technology studies concerned with the study of lay influence on the sciences usually analyze either the political or the normative epistemological consequences of lay interference. Here I frame the relation between patients, knowledge, and the sciences by opening up the question: How can we articulate the knowledge that patients develop and use in their daily lives and make it transferable and useful to others, or, `turn it into science’? Elsewhere, patient knowledge is analyzed eith…Read more
  •  27
    Enacting Appreciations: Beyond the Patient Perspective
    Health Care Analysis 13 (3): 203-221. 2005.
    The “patient perspective” serves as an analytical tool to present patients as knowing subjects in research, rather than as objects known by medicine. This paper analyses problems encountered with the concept of the patient perspective as applied to long-term mental health care. One problem is that “having a perspective” requires a perception of oneself as an individual and the ability to represent one’s individual situation in language; this excludes from research patients who do not express the…Read more
  •  25
    Through the looking glass: good looks and dignity in care (review)
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 16 (4): 953-966. 2013.
    There are roughly two meanings attached to the concept of dignity: humanitas and dignitas. Humanitas refers to ethical and juridical notions of equality, autonomy and freedom. Much less understood is the meaning of dignitas, which this paper develops as peoples’ engagement with aesthetic values and genres, and hence with differences between people. Departing from a critical reading of Georgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’, I will analyze a case where aesthetics are quite literally at stake: wo…Read more
  •  23
    Towards an empirical ethics in care: relations with technologies in health care
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18 (1): 81-90. 2015.
    This paper describes the approach of empirical ethics, a form of ethics that integrates non-positivist ethnographic empirical research and philosophy. Empirical ethics as it is discussed here builds on the ‘empirical turn’ in epistemology. It radicalizes the relational approach that care ethics introduced to think about care between people by drawing in relations between people and technologies as things people relate to. Empirical ethics studies care practices by analysing their intra-normativi…Read more
  •  20
    The particularity of dignity: relational engagement in care at the end of life
    with Bernike Pasveer and Dick Willems
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 21 (1): 89-100. 2018.
    This paper articulates dignity as relational engagement in concrete care situations. Dignity is often understood as an abstract principle that represents inherent worth of all human beings. In actual care practices, this principle has to be substantiated in order to gain meaning and inform care activities. We describe three exemplary substantiations of the principle of dignity in care: as a state or characteristic of a situation; as a way to differentiate between socio-cultural positions; or as …Read more
  •  15
    Shaping the subject of incontinence. Relating experience to knowledge
    with Maartje Hoogsteyns
    Alter - European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche Sur le Handicap 10 (1): 40-53. 2016.
  •  14
    This article is a written version of the lecture for the IPONS conference in Stockholm. The article starts from the claim that there is no such thing as technology, only different variations of technologies. These technologies, plural, all have their specific workings that we can only learn about by studying these empirically, by analysing the relations between people and their technologies. These relations are always unpredictable, as it is not given beforehand what values the participants purs…Read more
  •  13
    Cold technologies versus warm care? On affective and social relations with and through care technologies
    with Ingunn Moser
    Alter - European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche Sur le Handicap 3 (2): 159-178. 2009.
  •  11
    Accounting and Washing: Good Care in Long-Term Psychiatry
    Science, Technology, and Human Values 31 (4): 409-430. 2006.
    This article analyzes how the recent call for accounting in health care interferes with daily care practice and raises the question of how accounting practices relate to the aim of good care. The most influential accounting methods in the Netherlands suggest ways for professionals to legitimize their activities. The analysis of washing patients in long-term mental health care shows that different styles of accounting evaluate and legitimize care while structuring notions of what good care is. A …Read more
  •  5
    Wonderful Webcams: About Active Gazes and Invisible Technologies
    Science, Technology, and Human Values 36 (4): 451-473. 2011.
    How do technologies such as webcams influence health care and what concepts may describe this? This article explores the literature and analyses what people looking through webcams do within a particular health care practice in the Netherlands, that is, within the rehabilitation of people suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or asthma. Several ways to describe the activities webcams support and perform are identified. The webcam is concentrating the activities of its users…Read more
  •  1
    Uncontrolled evaluation : the case of telecare innovations
    In Merel Visse & Tineke A. Abma (eds.), Evaluation for a caring society, Information Age Publishing. 2018.