The art of 'writing in' the hospital under-life: auto-ethnographic reflections on subjugated knowledges in everyday practice.

Every working life will have a number of subjugated places, an 'immense remainder' of human experience that 'does not speak'. Auto-ethnography, an evocative and analytical form of writing which is itself an art, connects personal and cultural worlds by 'writing in' these ordinary everyday experiences. This auto-ethnographic study re-inscribes the everyday world of practice, which was 'written out' of my publications on the practices of a youth-specific occupational therapy project undertaken in the 1980s at Camperdown Children's Hospital. The paper evokes the hospital's 'under-life' as I experienced it. An assemblage of sense impressions and memories evokes the particular place where my writings are set and a gender analysis of hospital spaces in the early 1980s portrays the experience of a woman working in that place at that time. Auto-ethnographic accounts of practice can contribute to the field by revealing subjugated knowledges in professions populated by women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]