The Chronic Living conference will now take place from the 4th-6th of March 2021. Given that various travel restrictions may well remain at that time, we will be planning for a mixture of physical and digital presentations and modes of participation. We sincerely hope that as many of you as possible will be able to join us, perhaps with insights as to how the lives of your informants and collaborators have been transformed by COVID-19.
For more information go to their website: https://eventsignup.ku.dk/chronic-living
Chronic Living – quality, vitality and health in the 21st century an international conference have been postponed from 23-25 April 2020 to 4th-6th of March 2021, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
For information regarding the postponement go to: https://eventsignup.ku.dk/chronic-living/panel-overview-and-programme.html
Keynote Speakers:
While still (too) many people die from fatal diseases, more and more people all around the world are living with chronic conditions. Qualitative aspects of daily living, thus, emerge as objects of knowledge as well as sites of interventions just as “lifestyle” and “wellbeing” figure as targets of more and more health and welfare interventions. “Quality of life” has become a quality of care parameter measured by medical professionals who provide treatments for diseases that cannot be cured, only lived with. A “normal life” has become the promise in advertisements that pharmaceutical companies bring out. Preventive (mental) health interventions, “positive living” HIV projects, and patient associations, while providing advice and support families on how best to “live with” a particular condition, feed into imperatives of living well.
With this move towards quality, vitality and health, and with chronic living as object at the intersection of knowledge production and intervention, a new politics of living continues to unfold which poses methodological, theoretical, and normative challenges in the social sciences of medicine. Medical anthropology, sociology, STS and other neighbouring disciplines have a long tradition of studying the processes of living with (chronic) disease. Countless ethnographic studies have provided insights about how all around the world people go about their everyday life endeavours while actually living with depression, dementia, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease and more. As a result, a wide range of analytical tools and theoretical repertoires have emerged to grasp “chronic living” ranging from experience (intersubjectivity), existential meaning (leading a moral/ethical life), suffering (struggling along), belonging (relationality), doing (tinkering), performance (affordances) or as an object of disciplining (subjectivation).
We hereby invite you to join us to collectively build on these tradition(s); to engage, unpack, explore and tackle quality, vitality and health, which is to say chronic living and the politics of living that are at stake in it. We welcome contributions from scholars as well as colleagues working in other sectors, whether hospitals, patients associations or other. Panels around the following kinds of questions, empirically from around the world, are particularly welcome:
Panel proposals should include the following information:
Please submit proposals for open panels before the 31st August 2019 using this link: https://eventsignup.ku.dk/Chronic-Living
** Also, please note that a call for individual papers will be sent out on the 15th of September 2019 together with a list of open panels. It will be possible to submit abstracts directed at an open panel or as an independent contribution. **
Chronic Living is the final conference of the research project “The Vitality of Disease – Quality of Life in the Making” funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 63927 – VITAL).