Josh Seim

Josh Seim is a sociologist at Boston College. He is broadly interested in the governance of poverty and suffering, and this has led him into the sociologies of medicine, punishment, and more. His work has appeared in American Sociological Review, Punishment and Society, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Teaching Sociology, and other outlets. His book, Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering (University of California Press), asks a simple question. What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? Whether by compressing lifeless chests on the streets or by transporting the publicly intoxicated to the hospital, ambulance crews tend to handle suffering bodies near the bottom of a complex urban hierarchy. Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, Professor Seim shows how this work puts ambulance crews in recurrent, and sometimes tense, contact with the emergency department nurses and police officers who share their clientele. These street-level relations, however, cannot be understood without considering the forces that direct ambulance labor from above. Beyond the ambulance, Bandage, Sort, and Hustle advances a labor-centric framework for understanding how frontline institutions respond to a variety of hardships that torment down-and-out populations. This book has been featured on This is Hell!, The Annex Sociology Podcast, and New Books in Sociology, and it has been reviewed in Medical Humanities.