Ami Harbin

Discomfort, Judgment, and Health Care for Queers

This paper draws on findings from qualitative interviews with queer and trans patients and with physicians providing care to queer and trans patients in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to explore how routine practices of health care can perpetuate or challenge the marginalization of queers. One of the most common “measures” of improved cultural competence in health care practice is self-reported increases in confidence and comfort, though it seems unlikely that an increase in physician comfort levels with queer and trans patients will necessarily mean better health care for queers. More attention to current felt discomfort in patient–provider encounters is required. Policies and practices that avoid discomfort at all costs are not always helpful for care, and experiences of shared discomfort in queer health contexts are not always harmful.

Queering the birthing space: Phenomenological interpretations of the relationships between lesbian couples and perinatal nurses in the context of birthing care

As health care institutions continue to promote diversity initiatives within the context of Family-Centered and Woman-Centered Care, the taken-for-grantedness of heteronormativity and homophobia remain pervasive in health care practices, including those of perinatal nurses, to the extent that nurses’ relationships with lesbian birthing couples are often thwarted. Attending to the complexities of queer (lesbian) orientations embedded in the philosophical tenets of feminist and queer phenomenology, this article draws upon experiential findings derived from interview data to understand lesbian couples’ relationships with perinatal nurses in the context of birthing care in eastern Canada.

Safety and Sacrifice

ABSTRACT This paper critically investigates a possible tension between beliefs about the usefulness of police and prisons and awareness of the harms some communities face at the hands of criminal justice systems. If a person feels well-served by police and prison systems but becomes aware of the ways they are endangering some communities, they may feel they have a responsibility to work to transform or dismantle criminal justice systems, potentially sacrificing the safety they have gained from them. This paper considers more closely the understanding of safety underlying such a perceived ‘responsibility to sacrifice’. It clarifies an understanding of safety motivating both current systems of policing and incarceration and the idea of a responsibility to sacrifice: namely, the idea that safety is an exchangeable good, that is, that one person’s safety could be guaranteed by compromising another’s. It considers an available alternative understanding of safety as a shared good. The paper concludes by arguing that individuals do not have a ‘responsibility to sacrifice’ but instead have responsibilities to (a) understand that feelings of/beliefs about safety are deeply racialized, (b) cultivate habits and practices that build capacity for responding to harm, danger, and our perceptions of harm and danger; and (c) transform the realities of structural racism that protect white people and endanger others.

Detroit to Flint and Back Again: Solidarity Forever

For several years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting Emergency Management. In this essay, we focus on how community groups in Detroit and Flint advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, particularly during the period of 2014 to 2016. We explore how, through a series of direct interventions – including public meetings and international gatherings, independent journalism and social media, community-based research projects, and citizen-led policy initiatives – these groups contributed to challenging neoliberal governance, to undermining the legitimacy of state officials and their policies, and to shifting public consciousness around the human right to water.