This article describes a participatory action research project addressing the problem of African American access to and use of hospice. Qualitative interviews conducted with six African American pastors resulted in the identification of major themes used for development of a scale to measure barriers to hospice. A subsequent quantitative study documenting these barriers was conducted with 127 African American and European Americans. Results of both studies, which were used to further social action efforts in the community, indicated the cultural barriers of differences in values regarding medical care and differences in spiritual beliefs between African Americans and European Americans. Results also indicated institutional barriers, including lack of knowledge of services, economic factors, lack of trust by African Americans in the health care system, and lack of diversity among health care staff. Implications for social work practice and policy are discussed.

Biennale, reprinted by Verso in 2018. Portions of chapter 3 are forthcoming in the Colour Turn. tutions want to rid themselves of the slightest hint of failure at the earliest possible opportunity. In Silicon Valley, for instance, entrepreneurs are encouraged to heedlessly "Fail Fast, Fail Often, " regardless of risk. On "Fuck-up Night" at the annual FailCon conference, founded in San Francisco to address digital failure, entrepreneurs are invited to share their startup mistakes with a packed audience. Fuck-up Night started in Mexico City in 2012, but has since become so popular that it now convenes annually in more than seventy cities in twenty-six countries around the world (in short, it is a huge success). 2 One might also cite Elon Musk's fail-friendly autopilot software for Tesla; RAND-style zero-sum scenarios; 3 and General Electric's Six Sigma, a program aiming to measure and eliminate at least 99.99 percent of potential defects in every GE product. 4 Once found by hackers, even undetected high-tech errors, known as "zero-day exploits" (because a company has spent "zero days" trying to resolve the yet-to-be acknowledged problem), can sell upwards of $50,000 on China's black market, a precarious "dark net" of hackers and high-tech competitors who participate in activities ranging from traditional hacking disruptions, to extracting unforeseen errors in software, to finding entry points into a product's highly secret proprietary code. With Apple's iPhone, one single line of unobserved erroneous code, if caught Beyond high-tech vogue, failure shapes the contours of contemporary culture. In 2017, the Swedish Innovation Authority in conjunction with curator Samuel West launched the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden, and at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured a collection of "failed products and services from around the world, " including the Apple Newton, Bic for Her, Google Glass, Harley-Davidson Cologne, the Sony Betamax, and Swedish Fish Oreos. The idea was inspired by West's 2016 visit to the "Museum of Broken Relationships" in Zagreb, Croatia (2003-), an exhibition dedicated to failed love relationships. Upon his return, West extended the concept to industry at large. According to West, "80 to 90 percent of innovation projects fail and you never read about them, you don't see them, people don't talk about them. " 6 His claim is endorsed by market research firms like Fahrenheit 212, whose co-founder Mark Payne contends the number is actually closer to 90 percent. 7 One might thus infer the annals of technology deal with only 10 percent of the data available to them. From this perspective, it is not surprising to find our so-called innovation age steeped in failure. On a deeper level, humankind has always been marked by failure. "Life is what is capable of error, " Michel Foucault wrote in 1991, and indeed, because we can err, it is also in our capacity to grow and change thereafter. This insight returns us to what many philosophers have deemed the essence of ...

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