When the hospital becomes home - Visibility, knowledge, and power at Nila

This study explores the interrelations among visibility, knowledge, and pow er in a hybrid institution-a hospital that functions as a boarding school f or handicapped children. It demonstrates how the incongruity between the in stitution's formal definition as a hospital and its day-to-day reality play s a role in shaping the power structure, prioritization of types of knowled ge, and visibility of its agents. For through these groups' interactions wi th, reactions to, and acceptance of these structural determinants, the inst itution's own identity rakes shape around the conflicting discourses of soc ial control that it seeks to accommodate.