Im/material infrastructures: The social and ethical implications of telemedicine in New Mexico’s Mental Healthcare System

I have two primary objectives for the projected 3-month residency. First, to complete my doctoral thesis, Im/material infrastructures: Telemedicine in New Mexico, USA, and submit it to Durham University Department of Anthropology. Second, to translate my thesis chapter, The ethics of telemedicine: Negotiating the boundaries of when in-person care can be replaced by care over a screen, into a journal article for Social Science & Medicine.

My underlying conceptual and theoretical objectives are to develop pioneering work on the meaning and ethics surrounding care in the context of telemedicine. In disentangling the ways in which telemedicine changes the spatial and material organisation of care, this thesis aims to reveal new understandings around the social implications of medical technologies. This thesis explores the ways in which peoples' experiences of inequality, access to care, location and isolation change through telemedicine practices, and how these changes reveal new engagements with and understandings of health and care.  This thesis further explores and evaluates the ethics of telemedicine, problematising why and how telemedicine is accepted as an alternative to in-person care in some instances, and is rejected in others.