Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have been diagnosed with serious chronic medical conditions. Cheryl Mattingly proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as she explores case stories in this highly readable study. Depicting the multicultural urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, this theoretically innovative study illuminates communities of care that span both clinic and family and shows how hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances.

Contributor: Cheryl Mattingly Cheryl Mattingly is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Division of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She is the award-winning author of Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience and coeditor, with Linda Garro, of Narrative and Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (UC Press), among other books.