Medical and Healthcare Interactions: Members’ Competence and Socialization

Presenting a series of empirical studies by scholars working with approaches from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this book studies naturally occurring work and training encounters among medical and healthcare professionals or between professionals and patients.

Sara Keel is a Senior Teaching and Research Assistant at the Institute of Education of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Working within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, she investigates members’ understanding and embodied organization of ordinary, institutional, and professional practices. Her research projects focus on distinct settings, such as everyday family life, migrants’ press conferences, interprofessional hospital meetings, and more recently physiotherapy consultations to address socialization, membership categorization, patient participation, or the use of digital tools in healthcare as a members’ phenomenon. She has published in various international journals, her doctoral research, Socialization: Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life, has been published by Routledge (2016), and she has co-edited a collection on institutional interactions and special issues, most recently on touch and closeness in naturally organized activities.