- Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Theses
Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Theses
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ItemEthnospecific health and care: a critical ethnographic study of a Greek nursing homeKanitsaki, Olga ( 1999)This abstract examines how a Greek ethnospecific nursing home functions – situated within a health care system that operates within an English-language, and Anglo/ Australian derived culture. The nursing home was examined within a critical science paradigm guided, however, by Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. Critical ethnography as a research method was combined with Greek forms of speech in order to accommodate Greek women’s forms of social interaction and oral culture and to avoid imposing an alien research process on participants. Group discussions, formal and informal interviews, participant observation in a variety of forms and document examination were the approaches used to collect data in the field. A key and controversial finding of this inquiry is that the delivedry of ethnospecific aged care is heavily constrained and ultimately undermined – by the policies and practices of the Australian and dominant culture that was transposed in the nursing home, via the distribution of capital that privilege dominant groups in Australia. Because of this residents and carers remained structurally excluded from participation and decision making processes and located at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. This inevitably helped, particularly in regards to Greek women carers, and domestic staff, including Greek speaking registered nurses, not only to maintain but increase their negative ethnic experiences, historical oppression and exploitation. Nevertheless, ethnospecific care was provided to the residents at the cultural expressive level reflecting larger society’s tolerance of a conservative multiculturalism. Significant Greek cultural care, was mediated through the Greek carers, domestic staff and residents dispositions (habitus) that contextualised their interactions, relationships and practices, enabling their past (and because of this themselves) to live in the present in a meaningfull and dynamic way. For this reason, ethnospecific services, even when constrained by external socio-cultural and political hegemony, has more to offer the Greek aged than do mainstream aged care services.