Technology of Consent & Deferral of Ethics: An Ethnography of Informed Consent Documents

Paul Brodwin of UW-Milwaukee analyzes informed consent documents as paperwork technology woven into the routines of community psychiatry. Such documents exert puzzling and contradictory effects. Though cast in a language of patient autonomy, the documents ratify the staff’s disproportionate power. The talk explores the normative consensus engineered into the paperwork, how clinicians operate this apparatus of consent, and gauges the small space for ethical refusal carved out by staff.