Jeannette Pols (1966) is Professor Anthropology of Everyday Ethics at the department of Anthropology, Faculty of Behavioral & Social Sciences, and the department of Ethics, Law & Humanities of the Amsterdam Medical Center, University of Amsterdam. The chair is established between the faculties.  

The mission of Pols’ chair is to build bridges between research in medical ethics and medical anthropology. Her research and teaching develop the ethnographic study of ethical questions. Technologies are central here. In comparative ethnographic analyses, her research provides insight into the practical and desirable ways in which these technologies shape care and societies, and the repertoires of ‘being human’ that follow from these practices. The aim is to discover and develop normative directions in complex technological societies.

Pols research runs along three main axes. She studies: 

1. how ethical and aesthetic values are embedded in care practices;
2. the ways in which technologies help to shape actual positions of patients and caregivers, and how to evaluate these positions;
3. the practical knowledge of patients and carers.

Short CV 

Jeannette Pols studied Social Philosophy and Clinical Psychology in Groningen, when the quantitative turn in the social sciences was in full swing. Against these tides, she conducted her first ethnographic study in a nursing home for people with dementia, and published her first journal article about this research in the Dutch Monthly Journal for Mental Health Care (MGV) which was awarded with a honorable mention for being one of the best articles of the year’s issue.

Pols received her PhD from the University of Twente, for an award winning study in empirical ethics. The study ethnographically unravelled what ‘good care’ is by studying how nurses and patients shaped care ‘in action’. Not only did the ideals differ greatly between long term mental health care and residential care for older people, but so where the ways in which the nurses accounted for these ideals. Washing reluctant patients, for example, was legitimized in a scientific style (‘Our approach measurably develops patient independence!’), or an ethical style (‘You should take care of people who cannot look after themselves!’). Both styles of accounting co-exist, but it is unclear how they might relate.

At the time of this study, Pols worked with the Trimbos-institute in Utrecht. Since 2006, Pols works with the staff of the section of Medical ethics, Department of General Practice in the Amsterdam Medical Centre. Here, she studied the development of telecare in the Netherlands by ethnographically studying how patients use telecare technologies at home, and nurses in the hospital. She shows how both people and devices attempt to ‘tame’ one another, but also ‘unleash’ new possibilities.

Recently, she is working on a book with the working title: ‘On the empirical study of values. Aesthetic values in daily life and care’.

Jeannette Pols (2012) Care at a Distance. On the Closeness of Technology, a book published by Amsterdam University Press

Politicians promote telecare as an efficient and affordable solution in providing medical care for an ageing population. Telecare, they promise us, will support older people with chronic disease to ‘manage’ themselves better and thereby reduce the amount of health professionals needed. Nevertheless, technology-pessimists assert that telecare will transform human care into a distant and cold affair. They predict that older people will die while under the continuous surveillance of sensors and cameras, but remote from any real human contact.

This widely researched study presents some of the detailed ethnographic analyses of the pioneering care practices in which patients and nurses use telecare devices. It analyses these practices with the help of theoretical insights drawn from various fields, such as anthropology, science- & technology studies and empirical ethics.

The author concludes that neither a caring utopia of self managing patients nor an uncaring high-tech health care system bears any resemblance to actual care practices employing telecare. In the observed practices, telecare leads to more intense caring relations, resulting from a spectacular raise in the frequency of contacts between nurses and patients. Patients are much taken by this, not because they feel they are finally able to manage themselves better, but because they can ‘leave things to the experts’.The patients find that caring is something that is best done for others.

The book frames urgent questions about the future of care and telecare, and points to ways in which innovative care practices can be built on actual and everyday concerns, rather than on hopes, hypes or nightmares.

Keywords:care, ethnography, empirical ethics, values, technology, aesthetics, patient positions, practical knowledge of patients

Research Projects 

Book project

• Re-inventing the good life. 

2017 - ongoing

• Achieving good science. A cross disciplinary study.

2015-ongoing

• The rise of consumer e-health.

2013-2015

• Quality of Life and the feeding tube for people with ALS

2012-2015

• Whose problem is it anyway? Autonomy and substance use by people with intellectual disabilities.

2011-2013

• Dignity. Aesthetic values in daily life and care.
  Financing: ZONMW/ Aspasia NWO 

2014 - ongoing

• Delaying institutionalization, sustaining families: Comparative case studies of care at home for persons with dementia.
  Financing: Canadian Institutes of Health Research. With partners from Canada, UK, Iceland & Norway. 

2005-2011

• Ethical Frameworks for Telecare Technologies for older people at home (EFORTT). In collaboration with partners from UK, Spain & Norway.  EC FP7. Website: www.lancs.ac.uk/efortt/ 

2005-2008

• Care from a distance. A normative investigation into telecare.
  NWO Ethiek Research and Policy

Jeannette Pols teaches ethnographic and empirical ethics research to audiences trained or training in ethnographic research, science & technology studies, theory of the social sciences, and empirical ethics. She teaches empirical ethics and practical approaches to discuss ethical problems to medical students and health care professionals.

PhD projects

Ongoing

• 2018-present     Leonie Dronkert, Access denied. How diagnostic categories work in negotiating care  for people with learning disabilities
• 2018-present     Ellen Algera, The digitization of fertility.
• 2017-present     Annekatrin Skeide, The multiple shapes of pregnancy and birth– midwifery care in Germany
• 2017-present     Maja de Langen, Knowing Diabetes, Doing Diabetes: Practical knowledge in urban Indigenous Australia
• 2017-present     Christien Muusse, How to deal with a crisis? A comparative case study examining how mental health crises are dealt with in Trieste, Italy and the Netherlands.

Finished

• 2012-2019  Tanja Ahlin, Connected Care: Providing media-assisted care for elderly people in Indian transnational families.
• 2014-2019  Annelieke Driessen We are our body: Understanding the lived body and bodywork in dementia care.
• 2010-2019   Antje Seeber, The new model of palliative care in neurology.
• 2009-2019 Annemarie van Hout, Understanding telecare construction work. An ethnography of nursing practices.
• 2015-2018 Ariane d’Hoop, Spatial arrangements in psychiatric care practice. An anthropological inquiry.
• 2012-2016 Else Vogel, Eating enough: practices of eating well in Dutch obesity care.
• 2016-2017  Prachatip Kata, The politics of the aesthetic body, UvA, department of Anthropology.
• 2007-2012 Sabine Ootes, Being in place. Citizenship in Long-term mental health care
• 2006-2009 Susanne de Kort, Aims and reasons. Ethical questions about palliative systemic anticancer therapy.Visiting PhD students

Visiting PhD students

2019 Ivana Bogicevic University of Copenhagen| 2017 Harley Bergroth, Univeristy of Turku, Finland | 2017 Joana Zozimo, Univerity of Lisbon, Portugal | 2017 Benjamin Lipp, Munich Centre for Technology in Society,Munich, Gernamny | 2014 Tobias Hauesermann, Cambridge University| 2013; Karen D. Nielsen, Telecare & chronic disease, Copenhagen University| 2012 Juan Aceros, Aging and telecare, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona.