Auditory Space, Ethics and Hospitality: ‘Noise’, Alterity and Care at the End of Life

Abstract

This article examines the limits and potential of hospitality through struggles over auditory space in care at the end of life. Drawing upon empirical research and a nurse's account of noisy mourning in a multicultural hospice ward, I argue that the insurgent force of noise as corporeal generosity can produce impossible dilemmas for care, while also provoking surprising ethical relations and potentialities. Derrida's ideas about the aporias of the gift and absolute responsibility are used to make sense of the pushy generosity of alterity as it is made to matter through sound.

Cultural Vulnerability and Professional Narratives

“…Most significantly, her ''thinking with'' the story allows her to become vulnerable to the moral, affective, and political demands of difference that disrupt routine and formula and provoke deep thinking about how we are in the world (Gunaratnam, 2009). As Waddell (1989) has pointed out so astutely, attacks on thinking in social work are encountered on a daily basis and usually involve projections of pain.…”

Caring through Sound and Silence: Technology and the Sound of Everyday Life in Homes for the Elderly

“…Within the broad range of sonic worlds addressed in sound studies literature, most relevant for my research is the emerging debate on sound inside institutions. Scholars from anthropological as well as sociological backgrounds have analyzed sound in schools (Gallagher 2010(Gallagher , 2011, prisons (Rice 2016), hospitals (Harris 2015b;Rice 2013) and hospices (Gunaratman 2009). Their work engages with and answers to concerns raised about western ocularcentrism and the bias towards the visual in knowledge making and representation (Rice 2013;Samuels et al 2010).…”

Sensing space and making place: the hospital and therapeutic landscapes in two cancer narratives

“…‘Noise’ implies intrusion into the room and intrusion into his body. It represents another level at which interiority/exteriority is blurred; as Yasmin Gunaratnam notes in her work on ‘noise’ and end-of-life care, ‘sound is a complicated sensual, psychic and metaphoric medium for delineating bodily surfaces, within a field of forces, through which we come to feel and solidify relationships between inside and outside’ 56. Although scholars of sensory studies have long rejected the idea of listening as a passive activity, it is significant that Diamond cannot close his ears: he is of and in the soundscape, not an outside observer who is able to divert his senses.…”