Who is to be attended first? And how should such a decision be made? The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room ethnographically explores the everyday life of one of the thickest places in contemporary societies: the ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration laws, hospital overcrowding, life and death, intersect daily. The book describes the effect of those intersections for clinicians and their patients, as well as for policymakers and the healthcare system more generally.  Mirko Pasquini shows that there is more than medical urgency at...