Paper short abstract:

This presentation attends to the material and affective registers of pressure in organ donation. I draw on fieldwork and interviews with families and clinicians, and their personal and professional experiences around deceased organ donation during COVID to examine the fault lines and productive potentials of care in relation to life and death support.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation attends to the material and affective registers of pressure as care and crisis clash together in organ donation. I draw on Adelaide-based fieldwork and interviews with families and clinicians, and their personal and professional experiences around deceased organ donation during COVID. Pressure is a palpable and recurrent propensity in organ donation. It occurs intracranially and fatally in bodies that become brain-dead. It builds in families forced to make end of life decisions for which they are not prepared. And organ donation happens in hospitals where time and resource pressures bear down on critical care teams as they grapple with staff shortages and not enough resources. I use recent critical analyses of care to map the fault lines built into systems to reduce the burden of care, examining how pressure concentrates in some spaces and bodies more than others. And I explore alternative versions of care enacted by families and clinicians involved in organ donation and transplantation. This is a ‘promiscuous care’ (Chatzidakis et al. 2020) that is expansive and indiscriminate, and which may diffuse the force of pressure through radical interdependence.

Chatzidakis, A, Hakim, J, Litter, J. and Rottenberg, C. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.

Paper short abstract:

We explore interconnections between biosocial health and caregiving over lifecourses in the context of youth-onset type 2 diabetes in northern Australian First Nations carescapes. We discuss implications for addressing structural and institutional inequalities and for models of care.

Paper long abstract:

An epidemic of youth-onset type 2 diabetes (T2D) is emerging in First Nations communities across northern Australia. Although often considered a condition of later life, fetal exposure to elevated glucose levels predisposes children to T2D at an early age, leading to a cascading effect in which diabetes begets diabetes. To inform co-designed models of care for youth T2D across northern Australia, we explored diabetes experiences and social contexts in a series of case studies. Clinical outcomes for First Nations youth (aged 10-25 years) with YT2D were triangulated with interviews undertaken with the youth, their families and health professionals and analysed using a meta-synthesis approach. All youth had at least one caregiver with T2D or kidney failure, a diabetes complication. We show interconnections between intergenerational experiences of T2D and related conditions, and social conditions of poverty, food insecurity, lack of employment, children in out-of-home care and incarceration in First Nations families. To further illuminate interactions between biosocial health and caregiving over the lifecourse, we place Mendenhall’s framework of syndemic suffering (2012) in conversation with constructs of caringscapes and carescapes (Bowlby & McKie 2019). We argue that youth T2D can be conceptualised as both a deeply individual experience and a collective condition extending beyond bodily boundaries, with consequences for how care needs and responsibilities are understood and enacted. We discuss the implications for addressing structural and institutional inequalities and for northern Australian models of care.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents PhD research findings exploring experiences of grief while engaging with psychiatric institutional care practices. Drawing on a case study, it discusses self-harm as a way to break silences forming against medicalised discourses of care and processing deaths by suicide.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents PhD research findings exploring experiences of suicide bereavement and self-harming behaviour as a way to break silences. This research understands silence to manifest as a relational form of tension between two sensed elements, however subtle in its affect. It is experienced as a polysemic phenomenon fundamental to understanding meanings within a society.

This paper discusses the case of Regan, an individual engaging in self-harming behaviours. Taking an ethnographic approach, it explores manifestations of silence before and after his wife's death by suicide. It draws on semi-structured interviews and observations, including reflections on his time spent within a clinical mental health setting.

My research findings suggest self-harming behaviour may communicate unresolved emotions and trauma memories. For instance, Regan described self-cutting that progressively transformed into a ritualistic act in honour of his wife, who would cut before her death by suicide. Additionally, Regan disclosed accounts of living with schizophrenia and talked about subsequent medical interventions and experiences of psychosis that flattened emotion and affect. In this instance, silence forms with and against medicalised discourses and limitations in symbolic expression through language while processing emotional experiences concerning trauma memories, suicide bereavement, psychosis and self-harm. This paper argues that self-harm may signal the breaking of silence that serves to communicate experiences of fracture and disruption outside of language.

Paper short abstract:

A comparative study of Australia and New Zealand aged care workers who provide essential ‘life support’ to vulnerable members of society during the pandemic, querying social resilience framework to support worker's wellbeing particularly those of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse background.

Paper long abstract:

Across the Strait in both Australia and New Zealand, aged-care workers are classified as essential workers during the global pandemic providing ‘life support’ to one of the most vulnerable members of society yet essential support for the well being for these workers with an increase in workload are often lacking, particularly if they come from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse background (CALD). Previous research prior to the pandemic have highlighted the challenges CALD workers face including discrimination, lack of intercultural understanding and precarious employment conditions. A more recent pressing issue they face of gendered and racialised negative stereotyping due to media reporting of the global pandemic is also particularly salient with specific localized yet global context. Preliminary findings show that in the face of challenges such as social isolation they narrate how they value the employment opportunity in the health sector and more importantly, how they negotiate a sense of belonging locally and transnationally through online support network. Comparing studies in both countries provides an exploration of the types of ‘life support’ needed and potential social resilience of CALD aged care workers, which ultimately address endemic issues around quality of care in diverse and aging communities.