Suffering in Relation: An Ethnographic Study of Hospice Work

This thesis offers insights into how suffering unfolds as a relational experience by considering the day-to-day work of hospice staff. In sociology, suffering is understood as a social experience embedded in social and cultural circumstance. The lived experience of suffering is said to threaten an individual’s involvement in social life, their relationships and existing roles. However, whilst the existing work on suffering emphasises its social nature in this sense, it largely neglects the relationships between those providing care and the suffering individual. These relationships emerge through suffering, while other social relations are threatened and disrupted. The research focuses on how hospice workers negotiate, react to and engage with suffering, in order to examine their relationships with hospice patients. The thesis offers a contribution to several bodies of sociological work: on suffering, emotions, embodiment, the senses, and the social construction of the ‘normal’. The study is based on ethnographic research in a hospice aiming to investigate the work of people in a range of occupations. The ethnographic approach involved a sensory focus to illustrate how the hospice workers negotiate their intimate closeness with dying individuals, who are often suffering both physically and socially. The research indicates how the workers’ management of the physical body impacts on the social experience of suffering, and how certain relations of the dying person could be maintained through the workers’ interactions. In doing so, the work demonstrates how the suffering and dying processes are embedded in socially constructed norms, which are situated within the hospice space and in the everyday actions of the hospice workers. By exploring suffering in this way, the thesis offers an original contribution to existing sociological work. It illustrates how suffering is shaped by, and embedded in, the relationships between hospice workers and patients as a sensory, embodied and relational experience.