Doing Dignity

Christa Teston offers a smart and timing assessment of dignified health and medical care. Based on observations and interviews, Teston presents three case studies involving recent health and medical practice and extending theoretical scholarship. She demonstrates that dignified care is not only an ethical but also a rhetorical practice.

In this meticulously researched and deeply ethical book Christa Teston reveals dignity through entangled processes of acknowledging-imagining-persuading-reflecting. At a moment when suffering seems to be expanding around us, Teston offers material, grounded, real-time, often mundane, and always necessary means for approaching dignified care and ethically engaging difference.

Dignity is not as it seems. In this remarkable book, Christa Teston shows that dignity is not a universal value, but something that must be negotiated and practiced, again and again. With rigorous analysis, this book will be essential reading for disability studies, critical health studies, science and technology studies, and bioethics.

Christa Teston's Doing Dignity should be required reading for all who care or attempt to care for others. Through textured case studies of in/dignity, Teston encourages us to imagine otherwise, in feminist and critically disabled ways, and to look towards horizons where we might materialize an ethical politics of care.

Doing Dignity gives us a thoughtful new way to think about the human dignity as an action word that requires intent. Teston offers a practical and honest, and most importantly heartfelt look at what it means to value dignity in an unyielding world.