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At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa

Includes bibliographical references.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Abney, Kate Christine
Other Authors: Levine, Susan
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Social Anthropology 2014
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access_status_str Open Access
author Abney, Kate Christine
author2 Levine, Susan
author_browse Abney, Kate Christine
Levine, Susan
author_facet Levine, Susan
Abney, Kate Christine
author_sort Abney, Kate Christine
collection Thesis
description Includes bibliographical references.
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id oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/8690
institution University of Cape Town (South Africa)
language eng
last_indexed 2026-06-10T12:33:15.376Z
license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2014
publishDateRange 2014
publishDateSort 2014
publisher Social Anthropology
publisherStr Social Anthropology
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source_str UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/8690 At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa Abney, Kate Christine Levine, Susan Includes bibliographical references. The following thesis traces one year of ethnographic research within a contemporary Tuberculosis (TB) treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa. Brooklyn Chest Hospital (BCH) is considered to be a provincial TB centre of excellence in the Western Cape (Parsons et al 2010) and as such, caters to both adult and paediatric TB patients. While there are other similar facilities in South Africa, BCH specializes in paediatric TB and is the only facility of its kind in the Western Cape Province. Many (but not all) paediatric patients at BCH came from troubled social circumstances. Poverty, violence, substance abuse, and illness featured prominently in their lives. The thesis documents the many entanglements TB presents to patients, their physicians, teachers, and nursing staff in the context of Cape Town. Throughout the thesis, my argument is multi-faceted. Children are configured and classified in different ways: via Biomedicine, children rights and ethics discourse, volunteers working at the hospital, the hospital school space, and through the metaphorical and real burden of time and tedium one experiences within an institutional setting. While focused on children and their experiences, this thesis does not claim to be solely 'childcentred'. Rather, I bring together different perspectives from nurses, doctors, volunteers, family members, and children themselves to re-create the social and material life of a hospital. In doing so, I focus on the category of the child. Configurations- how people make sense of children and their experiences- underlie the process of paediatric patient making. The child is formulated into different categories which are unstable and unsettled. The 'child' appears here in many forms: the child as a biomedical object, a student patient, the child 'in need', and one who is burdened by time. 2014-10-21T13:41:45Z 2014-10-21T13:41:45Z 2014 Doctoral Thesis Doctoral PhD http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8690 eng application/pdf Social Anthropology Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town
spellingShingle Abney, Kate Christine
At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
thesis_degree_str Doctoral
title At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
title_full At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
title_fullStr At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
title_full_unstemmed At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
title_short At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
title_sort at the foot of table mountain paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in cape town south africa
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8690
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