Conversational Accessibility: Healthcare, Community, and the Ethics of Everyday Encounters

Abstract

Conversations between healthcare workers and patients are of ethical import and ought to be regarded as a significant healthcare practice in their own right. Yet patients’ ability to voice concerns about their care to a healthcare worker should not be taken for granted. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s embodied and interpersonal conception of human agency, I argue that phenomenology as a critical practice enables us to recognize that conversations with others, much like physical spaces, are places whose accessibility is not guaranteed. I then examine how issues of conversational accessibility are at play in the larger context of public health research and how we might rethink existing practices in light of community-based participatory research.