Paper short abstract:

This paper explores valuing practices and value in diabetes care. It is based on ethnographic research in clinical settings, everyday life and support groups. Situating values in care practices illuminates conflicting values and the work that goes into negotiating and sometimes bridging them.

Paper long abstract:

Diabetes care demands the balancing of different valuing practices and their resultant values. This paper stems from ethnographic research that follows different valuing practices involved in diabetes care within an urban Aboriginal Australian community. Diabetes is often first defined through clinical values; values derived from a drop of blood and numbers on a glucose monitor. Yet this practice of valuing diabetes is one of many. By situating values within different care practices, we can illuminate the conflicting values that must be negotiated in everyday diabetes care. Diabetes, or 'sugar' as it is often called by my interlocutors, can be valued through the blood placed onto a small machine. It can be valued through feelings of dizziness or fatigue, or its impact on social practices such as sharing food. Diabetes care can trigger new ways of valuing food, sociality, personal biographies and even Aboriginality and colonisation. Moving between clinical settings, everyday life, and diabetes care groups, I attend to the different values embedded within diabetes care practices and discourses of self-determination. By highlighting conflicting values, we can begin to understand why people often do the things that they know don't benefit their health, or that don't correspond to clinical normativities. I ask how such conflicts are negotiated and sometimes bridged by practices and tools. The glucose monitor is one such tool, attempting to produce an immutable numerical value, while practices of cooking exercising and socialising during support groups work to bridge or homogenise conflicting values between clinical and everyday care.