Student Name: Olivia Holtermann Entwistle
Department, Institution: Geography
UBEL Pathway: Human Geography
Supervisor: Professor Andrew Barry
Contact details/Social Media/Website:
About Me:
My background is in medicine, and I hold an MBChB (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) and an MA in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Health. Prior to starting my doctoral degree, I was working as a junior doctor in the NHS.
My Research
The global medical plastics market is worth US$22.26bn and the British National Health Service (NHS) produces approximately 2,500 tonnes of plastic waste daily. The issue of plastic healthcare waste has received increasing attention within the social sciences. By contrast, the processes by which plastics have become central to Western biomedicine have remained comparatively underexamined. This project will address this significant research gap.
My project approaches single-use medical plastics as a critical healthcare infrastructure, which is undergirded by claims to cleanliness and the promise of disposability. Via ethnographic and archival analysis, the project will interrogate the development of this infrastructure and the managerial, regulatory, clinical and waste work needed to continually maintain and reproduce it within the hospital landscape.
My project is situated at the intersection of medical and economic geography, science and technology studies (STS), and geographical and anthropological studies of infrastructure. This research is invested with particular urgency in the face of growing evidence about the ecologically damaging effects of plastics throughout their life-cycle.
The empirical and conceptual stakes of the project are threefold: i) it moves beyond an understanding of medical plastics as ‘inevitable’, to uncover the contingency of their place in biomedicine; ii) it examines the interrelation of healthcare with the petrochemical industry and considers how this relationship is continually reproduced; iii) it provides essential
Impact of My Research
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