La escolarización hospitalaria como prácticas de cuidado de niños gravemente enfermos

The study object of this thesis consists in the practices of care of people oriented towards the re/production of their welfare, regarding health and education. Care practices embody modes of socialization, which are connected with daily re/creation of the material and symbolic social life. This ethnography aims to describe and analyze care practices of the sufferings of seriously ill and hospitalized children and adolescents through the work they do every day with their school teachers in the pediatric inpatient areas of a public hospital in Buenos Aires. I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in successive stages during the years 2009-2011 in a hospital school settled in the western area of Greater Buenos Aires. To point out care practices of sufferings performed by school teachers allow me to make a political reading of these practices of care of seriously ill and hospitalized children and adolescents. The hospital is a public institution oriented to health care in which there are several logical care practices of sufferings undertaken by state and community agents. The tensions that occur (at least) between the caregivers make visible the conflicts around authorizations on legitimate ways to socialize these subjects who suffer through care practices. I analized this dispute more clearly to problematize the socialization processes that embody these teachers as care practices of sufferings, involving a hospital pedagogical school work. However, I note that in hospitals the dispute about the legitimacy of the care of sufferings also involves embodied medical practices.