Paper short abstract:

This paper examines processes of care among mental health service survivor activists to demonstrate how relationships are reconfigured. It explores how activist groups create spaces of autonomy and asks; what happens when responsibility for healing is shared? What about when ‘care’ is collectivised?

Paper long abstract:

The UK’s welfare system is in crisis, with the retrenchment of services, punitive and bureaucratic procedures as well as harsh austerity measures. In this environment, Mental health activist ‘survivors’ and ‘service evaders’ in London aim to collectivise and ‘speak out’ about iatrogenic harm resulting from such hostile settings (including from mental health treatments, services and professionals). In a context where social ties have often been exhausted, and trust in others has broken down, activist groups often aim to incorporate care into every-day life. Rejecting (dyadic) therapeutic relationships as unequal and individualising, many advocate collective methods and mutual support such as 'being alongside' each other in a crisis. ‘Mental illness’ is reframed in group settings and moved away from the biomedical sphere. This paper examines processes of care among activists to demonstrate how relationships are made, remade and reconfigured. It asks; what happens when responsibility for healing is not placed on one individual, but shared? What happens when ‘care’ is collectivised? It is concerned with how activists imagine and live out alternative realities by generating spaces of autonomy where multiple ontologies are negotiated, listened to and accepted. I highlight the value activists place on relational aspects of care and the capacity to sustain relationships in times of personal, social and economic crisis. In doing so, I reveal mental ‘illness’ and vulnerability as potential conditions for personal transformation and social re-generation, as well as social disruption.

Paper short abstract:

Elderly residential care is widespread yet under-examined. This ethnographic project looks at residents' experiences of dignity and wellbeing as embedded within interpersonal negotiations, turning to experience and stories to reveal complexities and contradictions in this taken-for-granted space.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of residential care facilities designed to meet new and dynamic needs of a growing retirement population. While research on these facilities is abundant, research with residents remains underdeveloped. Research on older adults can reproduce stereotypes of "the elderly", and consider older recipients of care as objects of research, rather than as people who mutually produce understandings of experience. In order to ensure that services meet the actual needs of this population, we need to understand the experiences of residential care from the perspectives of care recipients. This ethnographic research project is designed to engage the experiences and perceptions of residents themselves, focusing on personal relationships and intimacy, and exploring the ways in which socialisation is a navigated negotiation between actors within the context of residential care. This study nuances the notion of dignity and wellbeing in the residential care setting, looking at the co-constructions that produce and complicate residents' experiences of care.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the ongoing process of collectivisation and pharmaceuticalisation of care in austerity- laden Athens. It thus explores how ideals of health and belonging are tied to the access of pharmaceuticals which, in turn, come to represent new modes and practices of care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper ethnographically engages with the ongoing process of collectivisation and pharmaceuticalisation of care in austerity- laden Athens. It thus explores how ideals of health and belonging become increasingly tied to the access of pharmaceuticals which, in turn, come to represent new modes and practices of care.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in multiple social clinics of solidarity in Athens, I describe how pharmaceuticals circulate across different social spheres, crisscrossing the domestic, the public and the grassroots voluntary sector: in the social clinics, leftover medications are checked and redistributed to those people who cannot afford to buy them. In such context, the provision and distribution of pharmaceuticals come to represent the main mode of care that the social clinics are able to provide to an increasing numbers of citizens that have, over time, been denied access to the public healthcare resources.

Whereas sharing medications is locally seen as an act of care and solidarity, I will show how the medical and the social conflate, actually producing two different and contradictory orders of discourse: sharing pharmaceuticals is indeed a metaphor for collective care in the face of the state’s failure to provide it but it also entails the potential for new forms of dependencies and vulnerabilities.

Paper short abstract:

My paper argues that public health scenarios represent pandemic disease emergence through the “formulaic plot” of the “outbreak narrative” (Wald 2007), thereby privileging biomedical intervention and public sphere engagement at the expense of community wellness.

Paper long abstract:

In the fall of 2019, representatives from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with support from the World Economic Forum, convened an emergency meeting in anticipation of a novel coronavirus pandemic. They were not responding to COVID-19 but instead to a fictional exercise entitled Event 201. Event 201 is an example of scenario thinking, a narrative technique of uncertainty management that tells plausible stories of possible futures to prepare for the unexpected. As public health continues to stress preparation for—as well as the prevention of—disease, scenarios increasingly constitute a key public health tool even as the practice remains underexamined by public health researchers. Responding to Priscilla Wald’s suggestion that “the interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community,” (2007), my proposed paper—“Well-Laid Planning: Public Health Preparation and Scenarios of Community Wellness”—argues that contemporary public health operate with a radically constrained vision of public health that foregrounds biomedical intervention and public sphere engagement at the expense of community wellness.

My paper argues that public health scenarios represent pandemic disease emergence through the “formulaic plot” of the “outbreak narrative” (Wald 2007). Referencing representative public health scenarios, including "Clade X" (2018), and "Event 201" (2019), my paper argues that these scenarios overlook the “systemic factors that promote pandemics” (Butler 2012). My paper concludes by turning to illness memoirs—in particular Toronto “street nurse” Cathy Crowe’s "A Knapsack Full of Dreams" (2019)—for models of community wellness that can inform and inspire alternative scenarios of public health.