Normalizing the Exceptional: Medical Care and Architecture of Power in the Greek Public Healthcare System

A decade of overlapping crises - pandemic, austerity, and non-Western migration - reshaped public healthcare in Greece, with COVID-19 an institutional catalyst accelerating pre-existing exclusions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in four public hospitals in Attica, I examine doctors' discourses and practices under compounded crisis governance. The analysis suggests a specifically Greek configuration of conditional humanitarianism, in which structural constraints and ethno-religious perceptions shape uneven forms of care beneath universalist rhetoric. Doctors navigate these contradictions in ways that may reproduce, negotiate, or challenge exclusion, while institutional exhaustion and cultural hierarchies shape encounters with racialized patients. Hesitations and counter-voices reveal internal tensions.