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Folklore of Operational BanalityMedical Administration and Everyday Violence of Health

Folklore of Operational BanalityMedical Administration and Everyday Violence of Health This article explores the reductive workings of policy that lead to intimate everyday forms of violence within US-based medical administration. Using the framework of folklore of operational banality (“FOOB”), the article examines a geodata-driven way of addressing uncompensated medical care that targets “superusers” of the US health care system. The case scrutinizes the operative truths, procedural rationalities, and absurd reductions performed by this administrative system that sorts people in terms of cost and risk. It shows how such administrative strategies result in further bureaucratized inequities and harm, even as they claim to support life by ontologizing cost efficiency and cost-benefit thinking, accumulating biological data for geosurveillance and biosecurity, and treating risk and vulnerability as the property and responsibility of certain individuals/bodies and spaces rather than as the result of social-environmental problems. A parodic counterfigure appears in the case to amplify criticism of the individualized management of life/risk and the reliance on technocratic methods and biomedical models to define and allocate health care as separate from environmental and justice-oriented concerns. The figure of Health Coach App renders absurd the power relations of health interventions that exclude broader social etiologies of disease and illness and shows that collaborative approaches between environmental and medical humanities are needed to reveal banal administrative violence and to advocate for better policies. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Environmental Humanities Duke University Press

Folklore of Operational BanalityMedical Administration and Everyday Violence of Health

Krupar, Shiloh
Environmental Humanities , Volume 12 (2) – Nov 1, 2020
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References (75)

Copyright
© 2020 Shiloh Krupar
ISSN
2201-1919
eISSN
2201-1919
DOI
10.1215/22011919-8623208
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article explores the reductive workings of policy that lead to intimate everyday forms of violence within US-based medical administration. Using the framework of folklore of operational banality (“FOOB”), the article examines a geodata-driven way of addressing uncompensated medical care that targets “superusers” of the US health care system. The case scrutinizes the operative truths, procedural rationalities, and absurd reductions performed by this administrative system that sorts people in terms of cost and risk. It shows how such administrative strategies result in further bureaucratized inequities and harm, even as they claim to support life by ontologizing cost efficiency and cost-benefit thinking, accumulating biological data for geosurveillance and biosecurity, and treating risk and vulnerability as the property and responsibility of certain individuals/bodies and spaces rather than as the result of social-environmental problems. A parodic counterfigure appears in the case to amplify criticism of the individualized management of life/risk and the reliance on technocratic methods and biomedical models to define and allocate health care as separate from environmental and justice-oriented concerns. The figure of Health Coach App renders absurd the power relations of health interventions that exclude broader social etiologies of disease and illness and shows that collaborative approaches between environmental and medical humanities are needed to reveal banal administrative violence and to advocate for better policies.

Journal

Environmental Humanities – Duke University Press

Published: Nov 1, 2020

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