Paper short abstract:

Research on biosociality has offered great insights into how people come together through shared experiences of wellbeing, but the role of activism has often been in the background. This paper proposes the concept of biosolidarity to bring attention to the role of activism for biosocial groups.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological research on biosociality is abundant, and growing. To date, scholars have furthered our insight and understanding of the different ways that people come together through shared experiences of wellbeing. Despite the impact of this work, the role of activism in discussions of biosociality has often been in the background. This paper proposes the concept of biosolidarity to bring attention to the role of activism for biosocial groups. Building on long-term ethnographic research within a less-well-known mental health community, this paper describes the importance of labelling and diagnosis in the process of building biosocial connections for people with compulsive hair pulling (also known as trichotillomania) in the UK and United States. By introducing the concept of biosolidarity, I give focus to the role of activism within this community, to show how the process of biosociality (diagnosis; meeting others; and 'coming out') often leads to forms of activism that help to increase the visibility of the wider community - acts of biosolidarity - which in turn increases the possibility of biosocial connections to be made. I argue that biosociality and biosolidarity work together to reproduce one another and as such the role of activism is vital in understanding biosociality. By considering the differences between the two concepts, I propose that anthropologists can better account for the public and private ways that people come together to improve the lives of their communities through sharing experiences, offering support, and advocating for better care.

Paper short abstract:

This proposal examines how asylum seeking mothers put into practice ordinary acts of creation and imagination to ensure the wellbeing of their children, and argues the role fantasy, pleasure, and invention play in making well in sites of precarious living.

Paper long abstract:

Like a contemporary dystopian remake of ‘’Life is Beautiful’’ (Benigni, 1997), mothers in the British asylum system use a mixture of imagination, creativity and play to create a sense of normality for their children within very uncertain and precarious experiences of the home. Repeatedly deemed unsuitable for people seeking refugee protection, asylum accommodation impacts on many aspects of its residents' physical and mental health and wellbeing, but also witnesses moments of enjoyment and fun. This paper draws on fourteen months of ethnographic research on the experiences of motherhood among women residing in asylum accommodation in London to examine how mothers put into practice imaginative acts that amuse and nurture their children beyond the health impacts of asylum politics. Concerned by their children’s deteriorating health and determined to ensure they are well in an all-encompassing sense of the word, mothers engage in imaginative games and resourceful endeavours to generate alternative realities, hoping to shield them from the dystopian effects of politically induced legal and material precarity. Entanglements between people’s health and the asylum housing environment urge us to rethink the ways in which we approach the notion of well-being as a biosocial phenomenon in sites of precarious living and prompts us to interrogate the role fantasy, invention, and pleasure play in making well. I argue that in their efforts to make homes more affirming places for their children, mothers’ ordinary and often improvised acts of imagination and creation contribute to making other worlds possible and lives worth living.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with chronic pain as a biological and socially embodied condition. Starting with insights from online communities where people with chronic pain re-negotiate agency, I will discuss how pain measurement relates to a biosocial understanding of pain as an existential condition.

Paper long abstract:

Chronic pain (CP) - pain that persists for longer than three months - is a complex condition that affects everyday life. Yet pain eludes clear-cut measurement and relies on a person’s symptom reporting and descriptions. In this paper, the experiential nature of pain is considered through examples from online communities for people with CP, and from a clinical point of view.

People with CP use these online platforms to seek understanding, make connections, and receive-and-offer support to others. One of the positive effects of these emerging communities is a sense of belonging and togetherness that counters the loneliness produced by diagnoses - which can be othering and stigmatising. Online communities offer a space to meet peers living within similar parameters or at least grappling with similar questions. With healthcare services oriented towards a biomedical model of health, support for biosocially complex conditions like chronic pain dwindles. Faced with prescriptive services and limited accessibility, online communities offer a space to replenish one’s sense of agency by generating knowledge together in a space outside the boundaries of mainstream ableism.

Within the clinic, from the 70s onwards there has been a proliferation of measures aiming to obtain an objective picture of pain while grappling with experiential subjectivity. I will argue that, learning from online communities, a focus on agency and community-building may help suture the gap between biological and social approaches to CP and consider alternative forms of care and wellbeing.

Paper short abstract:

Living with chronic pain changes a person's relationship to time. In this paper, I explore how living with chronic pain leads to a life lived 'in the subjunctive', and consider how this led to the development of the concept of 'worth it' pain for the women who took part in my research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in North East England, focused on the lives of women who live with a diagnosis of a chronic pain. I consider how living with chronically painful conditions necessitates a life lived 'in the subjunctive' (Whyte, 2002). The subjunctive is a future-oriented tense which emphasises the importance of 'chance' in how a person navigates the future. While living with chronic pain, the future is measured against the present, and choices are made about activities based on the potential they have for causing the person pain in the future.

I contemplate why people continue to choose to do activities that might cause pain in the future. This 'chanciness' allows hope to be incorporated deeply into the kinds of decision making logics a person goes through. Through exploring the kinds of relations of care, solidarity and fun experienced through interactions with both the individuals and support groups that took part in my fieldwork, I consider the importance of hope and feelings of community which help to govern how chronically ill people live with many different potential futures in mind. Often, certain choices for activity were described to me as leading to 'worth it' pain - actions that that made a life worth living. Using this idea of 'worth it' pain, I consider what hope looked like for my participants, and how it was made material through the mundane aspects of everyday life with chronic pain.

Paper short abstract:

How do relationships with the "wild", and ecological diversity inform human wellbeing? This paper presents research from highland Scotland concerned to better understand these intersecting dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

The landscapes of the highlands of Scotland have been sites of ideological and political contestation for centuries: what the environmental historian Smout (2000) categorises as shifting engagements of “use and delight”. In this paper I present ongoing research from highland Perthshire, around the intersection of ideas of the “wild”, ecological diversity, and human wellbeing. Through participation, observations and conversations with workers, volunteers and visitors at rural sites managed primarily to restore ecological diversity from old deer estates, the research fosters conversations around what we mean by wellbeing. How do engagements with these spaces – be that climbing mountains, remaking paths, or managing “nature” – impinge on what it means to be well? With these encounters and moments of interaction in these landscapes, with both humans and non-humans alike, I have attempted to “include ethnography and natural history” (Tsing, 2015). Does this engaged biosocial methodological approach (or rather, perhaps, eco-social approach) help us to better understand human wellbeing?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a Makushi myth about the origin of fish poison plants. The story can be taken as an explanation for the origin of fishing plants and as an allegory about the role of diversity in maintaining “the good life”. Here, cultivation is a key notion for generating wellbeing and vitality.

Paper long abstract:

Poiesis: from the ancient Greek ποιεῖν, “to make” – “an activity in which something is brought into being that did not exist before” (particularly, through poetic language).

Ecopoetics: ‘eco-’ from oikos, “house, home, or hearth” – thus, the ways in which poetic forms can help make or cultivate a sense of dwelling in, on, or with the earth.

In this paper, I will explore a particular mythological story (panton) from the indigenous Makushi people of the Rupununi region of Guyana. The story, known as the Swordfish Tree, concerns the origin of fish poison plants (a’ya). It describes how the various fish poison plants used by the Makushi today originated from the decomposing body of a human boy during the mythological beginning times (pia’ton). In one sense, the story can be understood as a cosmogonic explanation for the diversity of plants used in traditional fishing practice. In a more figurative sense, it might be taken as an allegory about the importance of biocultural diversity for cultivating “the good life” amongst human communities. The analysis of the Swordfish Tree myth will lead to a deeper rumination on the role of cultivation – of these culturally-pivotal plants, but also of persons (pemon) (highlighting also where those two categories elide) – in maintaining wellbeing, as well as social, moral, and cosmological order. In the discussion, I will consider vernacular notions of speciation, health, life, and death – all situated in the critical context of the Amazonian Anthropocene.

Paper short abstract:

This paper describes how crafting miniature objects is a simultaneous process of creating 'wellness' for the people who make objects that range from dolls house furniture to tiny dioramas. Here, I focus on the 'state' of miniature creativity. What does it feel like and what does it do to makers?

Paper long abstract:

It is increasingly acknowledged that engaging in creative pursuits impacts people's lives in ways that may be considered good for their health. However, the mechanisms through which such impact operates are poorly understood. Based on nine months' of ethnographic fieldwork with crafters who make scaled down objects, I explore how makers craft what they describe as reality, in miniature. Keen to move beyond what they see as simplistic explanations from outside observers that crafting miniatures is a mere form 'childish escapism', miniaturists instead report how they very seriously physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually attune to the 'realism' of the full-scale world in order to cast it anew.

This paper describes what this process of 'crafting small, grasping big' feels like, both biologically and socially. As they make, miniature crafters harness observation, imagination, memory, experimentation, humour, emotion, perspective (and more) as they play with scale, material, colour, texture and function. By entering a state of creativity (akin to chaos), makers yield to self-organization under conditions of constraint; recursivity under conditions of release; and fractal patterning under conditions of disorder. It is precisely being in this 'chaotic state', replete with a host of tensions: structure and variety; expectation and surprise; simplicity and complexity; instability and stability; predictability and unpredictability etc. that makers report makes them feel 'high', 'released', 'joyful' and ultimately, 'well'. Far from providing an 'escape', making miniatures opens makers up to a state of creative chaos, in which they feel the complexity of 'reality' and feel 'well' as a result.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores pathways to wellbeing for ethnic minority LGBTQ+ young adults despite their experiences of intersecting and compounding structural and inter-personal violences. We will discuss on how our participants cope with, resist, and find queer joy in a challenging world.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years there has been increased interest in the lives and experiences of ethnic minority sexual/gender minority individuals. In particular, the challenges they experience as individuals with multiple minoritized identities. For example, “multiple minority” individuals experience poorer mental health and wellbeing outcomes than their heterosexual/cisgender peers and are subject to intersecting and compounding structural and inter-personal violences.

As well as employing ecosocial theory, a common framework to explain poorer wellbeing among sexual minority individuals is minority stress theory. The theory points to experiences of stress brought about by discrimination and internalised homophobia as crucial to understanding poorer health outcomes, while highlighting the potentially ameliorative effects of individual and community level resources and coping strategies.

However, while important work has been conducted on the challenges experienced by sexual/gender minorities (SGMs), including ethnic minority SGMs, narratives of pain, victimisation and trauma dominate. While valuable, presenting lives solely through deficit models has crucial consequences for efforts to close health and social inequities by obscuring the strengths, skills and agency already present.

Responding to the re-framing and re-focusing work of our participants during semi-structured interviews, we focus on how our participants cope with, resist, and find joy in a challenging world. With one eye remaining on the structural violence experienced by this group, we also acknowledge these themes are not uncomplicated goods, but often necessary tools with their own complexities and drawbacks. Nonetheless, we hope to illuminate pathways to wellbeing and joy for a group often framed through pain.