God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End
Dr. Casey Golomski (University of New Hampshire)
A new work of creative ethnographic nonfiction, God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End (Rutgers University Press and Wits University Press) shows how older ‘racist’ whites and their black nurses find grace together among their ghosts and despite the odds. Set thirty years after apartheid in South Africa with comparative points to the US, it features the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island Prison nurse as well as stories of queer older adults and healthcare providers, teaching us how racism, ageism, and sexism impact where we end up, who cares, and what matters in the end.
While grounded in seven years of immersive research, the book is narrated conversationally as if taking place in a single day and employs creative literary devices like poetic form. This seminar offers an overview of the book's findings as well as the author's creative ethnographic process as one of poiesis -- making or generating conditions for which racial, existential, and other reckonings come into being for research participants and readers -- relating to recent approaches in anthropology of aging, care, visuality, and the Otherwise.
Biography
Casey Golomski is an award-winning creative writer and cultural and medical anthropologist. His research centers perennial questions about life, death, and their thresholds, asking how people work through and memorialize critical events in their lives and communities. Aside from authoring many academic and literary publications, including the book Funeral Culture (Indiana Press), he’s been interviewed for and cited by media outlets such as the New York Times, The Conversation, New Hampshire Public Radio, New Hampshire Magazine, AlexNews, Times of eSwatini, News24, and Business Times.