Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the experience of cringe as a chronically conditioned response to normative expectations among young disability activists in China. By how people process and share cringes, I explore their implications for intimacy and worldmaking in China's disability rights movement.

Paper long abstract

“尬 (ga)” is a catchy expression among young Chinese netizens over the past decade. Similar to the English notion of cringe, Ga denotes a range of embodied reactions such as muscle tension or sweating when noticing awkward interactions, leading to speechlessness, uncertainty about how to respond, or forced laughter. Although most literature approaches cringe as an episodic response to an uncomfortable situation, this paper examines the extent to which ga becomes a chronic condition where one constantly experiences a strong mismatch between what one feels and what is normatively expected. I examine how cringe surfaces in hierarchical encounters with authorities when direct anger and assertive actions are not viable, if not completely censored.

Based on fieldwork with young disability activists in southern China. Through analyzing memes shared in private messages, venting conversations in closed groups, or eye contact when people face each other, I argue that sharing cringes has become an everyday practice of my disabled interlocutors as they navigate China's rapidly changing society and make sense of the norms and expectations. I argue that such sharing of cringes/ga – I call these practices cringe work -- allows them to process, challenge, disrupt, or resist (albeit covertly and subtly) normative ways of being disabled in China, as structured by the forced positivity and projects of nationalism and paternalism, as well as the emerging accessibility entrepreneurial projects. Understanding the chronic impacts of these power dynamics helps us better understand the contemporary disability rights movement in China.

Paper short abstract

This performance dialogue weaves an ethnographer’s writing with a writer’s storytelling. We share our stage to resist the binary and tell you about the everyday in chronic Lyme disease.

Paper long abstract

The Lyme disease epidemic has remained a historically invisible event across Europe. As its international visibility grows, the debate becomes more binary. Medics focus on the contested nature of chronic Lyme. In Scotland, patients and patient advocates try to make meaning of this contention by reproducing traditional medical epistemologies and learning the language of doctors so that they and their illness are not discredited. Important everyday epistemologies of chronicity that are well-known within patient communities remain unknown to biomedical, biosocial and economic space: the body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts, PTSD, hypervigilance, loss of social circles, changing relationships to nature, and the late-night conversations with a predatory more-than-human Other.

Let us tell you about these everyday, less-well-known spaces. Let us challenge the academic polarity that excludes interlocutors from our conferences. Part presentation, part performance, Ritti Soncco (medical anthropologist) and Scottish author and patient advocate Morven-May MacCallum share the stage. We weave traditional ethnographic methods with advocacy and storytelling practices. The bacteria speaks and we cower. The disabled body creaks and we feel betrayal. Swirling becomes a performance, a cross-disciplinary dialogue between an anthropologist and an author. We sidestep the unhelpful binary to bring together personal stories, imagination, and multispecies relationship with medical knowledge, to imagine future medicine in tandem with the stories that would be lost if we befriend categories too heavily.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes auditory processing disorder (ADP) within ADHD as a socially, politically, and medically constructed category, highlighting the intersection of audism and ableism and their influence on the biomedical categories, understandings of sensory difference and personhood.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines auditory processing disorder (APD) as a part of ADHD as a socially, politically, and medically constructed category through which ideas of normality, attention, deservingness, and responsibility are produced and contested. APD occupies an unstable position across biomedical, educational, and institutional domains, where it is often framed as either sensory deficit, cognitive dysfunction, moral failure, or personal responsibility. Rather than treating APD as a discrete diagnosis, I approach it as a constructed and contested category at which medical authority and normative expectations of communication, personhood and and productivity converge.

Ethnographic attention to sites like classrooms, online spaces or workplaces shows how auditory difference is continually reclassified through encounters among audiometric data, moral judgments about attention, and institutional norms of efficiency. Difficulties with listening or filtering sound may become evidence of hearing loss, inattentiveness, deviance, or lack of discipline, depending on which categories are available and credible. Following Friedner and Block’s (2017) call to analyze deafness and neurodivergence side by side, this paper focuses on how and where discriminatory structures such as audism and ableism intersect, co-produce hierarchies of legitimacy, and reinforce narrow understandings of communication.

By tracing how APD is made and unmade across these contexts, this paper examines the possibility of destabilizing diagnostic boundaries in order to imagine more expansive forms of access, care, and belonging, and to open space for sensory solidarities (Friedner, Block 2017) that challenge entrenched moral economies of ability.

Paper short abstract

This paper explores an ethnographic tussle between new biopolitical categories of “Troubles trauma” and neurodivergence, within neighbourhoods of Belfast particularly touched by the conflict. At the swirling threshold between these stories, people made sense of their bodyminds and histories anew.

Paper long abstract

In the long aftermath of mass violence in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland, meanings of disability and chronicity are splintering. Reparation bureaucracies for harms done during the conflict have substituted categorisations of victimhood with disability, creating new forms of disabled subject and discourses of “Troubles trauma”. Yet among fellow neurodivergent and disabled people in the working-class neighbourhoods of west Belfast where infrastructural legacies of sectarianism and the violence continue to shape daily life, these divisions between (for instance) autism and trauma are a site of debate, doubt, wonder, and a search for truth. Where reparation, housing or disability benefit bureaucracies aim to elucidate stable biopolitical categories that would define a sufferer of Troubles PTSD (supposedly curable, ambiguously chronic) against an autistic person (disabled for life), neurodivergent people in west Belfast mischievously translated their own interpretations of trauma and autism, creating new swirling thresholds at which the meanings of both were transforming alongside changing stories about what happened during the conflict. In a tussle with colliding narratives through which to make sense of their bodyminds, histories and livelihoods, they gathered in kitchens, cross-community groups, autism support meetings, housing campaigns and urban gardens to ask together: “How do you know what’s autism and what’s trauma?”. The point of the question was to wonder. Disability in the long aftermath of the conflict, then, tarries in the dichotomy between an expression or critique of mass injustice written on bodyminds, and a lively, visceral truth of embodied difference that overspills moral and political meanings.

Paper short abstract

Women’s cancer trajectories in Mayotte reveal disability and chronicity as unstable, negotiated categories. Moving through clinics and bureaucracies, women encounter shifting thresholds of diagnosis, deservingness, and care, in the context of postcolonial politics and an underfunded health system.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes women’s cancer trajectories in Mayotte to theorize disability and chronicity as unstable classificatory effects rather than fixed bodily states. Drawing on ethnographic research in clinical and bureaucratic settings, it tests the concept of “swirling thresholds” to examine how biomedical temporality, moral economies of deservingness, and postcolonial governance intersect to continually make and unmake categories of illness, disability, and care.

In Mayotte’s underfunded health system, cancer moves ambiguously between the registers of advanced or chronic condition and disabling impairment. Whether women’s conditions are rendered legible depends less on clinical indicators than on their navigation of administrative documentation and migration policies. Disability and chronicity thus emerge as relational achievements, produced through encounters with institutions that promise neutrality yet generate new polarizations between treatable and abandoned bodies.

The paper also argues that these categorical instabilities are politically productive processes that sustain what has been theorized as slow and structural violence. Anti-immigration policies and underfunded health infrastructures transform uncertainty and waiting into governing techniques, situating women in prolonged states of suspension. Rather than a simple opposition between disability and chronicity, the analysis foregrounds their mutual entanglement: chronicity becomes disabling through delay and neglect, while disability is repeatedly deferred through demands for future recovery.

By tracing the everyday life of categories across clinics and welfare offices, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on biopolitics, care, and polarization. It demonstrates how attention to classificatory instability opens critical space to reimagine disability and chronicity beyond fixed hierarchies of value.

Paper short abstract

This paper asks how long-term pain is named as pediatric persistent pain and fibromyalgia in Finland, and how meaning, morality and imagined futures are at play in this dynamic. We show that naming long-term pain reveals a swirling threshold where disability and chronicity are complexly negotiated.

Paper long abstract

This paper attends to long-term pain as a swirling threshold of disability and chronicity. Drawing on research on fibromyalgia and persistent pediatric pain in Finland, we examine how pain is named—through particular words and diagnostic categories—and how meaning, morality, and imagined futures are at play in that naming. In pediatric pain clinics, the label of chronicity is actively resisted. Instead, clinicians emphasize children’s plasticity and capacity for recovery as justification for intensive efforts to manage pain before its entrenchment. Meanwhile, the diagnosis of juvenile fibromyalgia is categorically avoided, as fibro and its attendant ‘chronic pain personality’ (kipukroonikko) is cast as the most undesirable possible future. By contrast, those whom we call fibro-literate clinicians view a fibromyalgia diagnosis as having the potential to offer patients recognition and a language for their experiences. Yet they also acknowledge the risk that this diagnosis may invite dismissal by clinicians or insurance providers. To keep future possibilities open, patients may thus be told that fibromyalgia sensitizes them to pain, but be given a different formal diagnosis. Juxtaposing these cases, we show how the naming of long-term pain reveals a swirling threshold where disability and chronicity are complexly negotiated. In light of these findings, we ask: what kinds of activism, collaboration, and research could contribute to ensuring that the futures of people living with pain - whether young or old; with or without formal diagnosis - be less painful, and providing of the care required for life to be livable, despite pain that lingers?

Paper short abstract

In this paper, I situate Down syndrome as a lens for exploring "vital disjunctures" of chronicity. By this I mean to highlight how embodied, social, and moral dimensions of aging serve to mark - and unmark - disability over a lifetime.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I situate Down syndrome as a lens for exploring "vital disjunctures" of chronicity. By this I mean to highlight how embodied, social, and moral dimensions of aging serve to mark - and unmark - disability over a lifetime. To do so, I focus on how specificities of Down syndrome, a chronic (and congenital) condition, sometimes surged into the foreground and otherwise receded out of focus for families living in Amman, Jordan. Aging relationally, with and without Down syndrome, contradictions of chronicity ebbed and flowed as families attempted to navigate shifting expectations and demands of care. I use the concept of 'vital disjunctures' in conversation with that of a "vital conjuncture," or "a socially structured zone of possibility that emerges around specific periods of potential transformation in a life or lives" (Johnson-Hanks 2002, 871). By vital disjunctures, I mean to emphasize how these zones of possibility and transformation, when viewed relationally (at the family level) and comparatively (across family units), create disjunctive experiences and outcomes. Vital disjunctures reveal how the contradictions and instabilities of chronic conditions extend beyond individual bodily boundaries and life trajectories, even as their unequal effects also concentrate in individual life stories and pathways (or paths curtailed).

Paper short abstract

Focusing on the life of a Romani woman living with diabetes-related blindness, this paper explores how chronic illness unfolds not as a stable condition located in the individual body, but as a relational process embedded in family ties, structural violence and shifting regimes of recognition.

Paper long abstract

Chronicity is commonly framed in biomedicine as a longitudinal condition requiring adherence, foresight, and paced self-management. This paper asks what comes into view when attention shifts away from this temporal narrative toward the social, material, and political arrangements entangled with chronic conditions. Taking up the panel’s notion of “swirling thresholds, I draw on ethnographic research with a Roma community to explore how diabetes becomes entangled with shifting distinctions between compliant and non-compliant, deserving and undeserving, autonomous and dependent patients. Rather than unfolding smoothly over time, diabetes oscillates between manageability and crisis, revealing how chronicity is continually produced, interrupted, and destabilised. In clinical encounters, chronicity operates as a moral technology that sorts patients according to their capacity to manage time, adhere to treatment and access biomedical technologies. These classificatory logics promise clarity and fairness, yet they render precarious lives illegible, producing patients whose interrupted care and uneven access are read as deviance or irresponsibility. In everyday life, these same categories swirl with family obligations, infrastructural breakdown, and institutional mistrust, transforming chronicity into a fragile, collective, and morally charged daily task. By tracing how chronicity is made and unmade across clinical encounters and domestic spaces, this paper shows how disability and chronic illness emerge not as fixed categories but as unstable effects of these swirling thresholds. Attending to chronicity in this way foregrounds the conditions that make illnesses chronic, while also revealing how chronicity is negotiated and reconfigured, opening space to rethink care, responsibility, and justice beyond temporal and individualising models.

Paper short abstract

This presentation teases out moments where being classified under ‘chronicity’ or ‘disability’ or both mobilizes different kinds of care for thalassemia and sickle cell disease in India’s fragmented healthcare.

Paper long abstract

In 2016, inherited blood disorders- thalassemia and sickle cell disease- were included in India’s Rights of Persons with Disability (RPwD) Act, carving the path for social welfare distribution to affected patients. For policymakers and clinicians who lobbied for this inclusion, the chronicity of these diseases and their therapeutic interventions were a crucial reason to include them as disabilities. However, for grassroots activists, sickle cell’s recognition as disability held historical significance due to its disproportionate prevalence among low-caste and tribal minorities who remained neglected as opposed to thalassemia patients belonging to middle- and upper-caste (and -class) groups. This presentation teases out moments where being classified as ‘chronicity’ or ‘disability’ or both mobilizes different kinds of care for thalassemia and sickle cell disease in India’s fragmented healthcare. Drawing on policy documents and narratives of patients, clinicians and health activists, I show how ‘chronicity’ appears as a crucial term among experts to gather resources for clinical management and care, while disability gathers momentum towards collective action, claims of belonging and social benefits that concern patients, families and activists. Ultimately, I speculate if the approaching the “swirling thresholds” of chronicity and disability might highlight both tensions of social belonging as well as their simultaneity to access care for neglected diseases in India and beyond.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how mild intellectual disability (MID) is enacted when access to care is at stake in the decentralized Dutch care system. Following "clients" and social workers, it shows how MID takes shape across care regimes with competing logics of eligibility and deservingness.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how the category of mild intellectual disability (MID) is enacted in situations where access to care is at stake within the context of the decentralized Dutch care system. Drawing on ethnographic material that follows people labeled with MID and their social workers as they navigate pathways towards care and support, I analyze how MID is enacted across distinct care regimes that rely on sharply demarcated logics of eligibility, responsibility, and deservingness.

Empirically, I show how MID operates as a relational category that takes on different meanings across care regimes and life worlds. For those labeled with it, MID is often experienced as an undesirable identity, while simultaneously functioning as a prerequisite for accessing certain forms of care. Yet this paradox of recognition does not guarantee access. MID is frequently deemed insufficient for long-term care, where more severe or clearly provable forms of disability are required.

At the same time, MID rarely appears in isolation. Mental health problems, poverty, and other forms of social vulnerability commonly co-occur, yet these overlapping categories often obstruct rather than facilitate access. While comorbidity is widely acknowledged in research and practice, care infrastructures continue to demand categorical and diagnostic purity.

Focusing on moments where biomedical and social categories of care overlap, I argue that MID reveals how classificatory systems that promise fair allocation of care resources produce exclusion, delay, and distributed responsibility while failing to do justice to the complexity of the real-life problems of those living with the category of MID.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on a cross-country study of disability benefit claims, this paper explores “welfare thresholds” where diagnoses are politicised. It shows how welfare regimes validate forms of knowledge that shape disability, chronicity, and work capacity in relation to the right and obligation to work.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how disability and chronicity emerge within contemporary welfare systems, not as stable categories but as shifting and contested relations. Drawing on an ERC-funded comparative study of out-of-work benefit claimants in the UK, Estonia, Norway, Spain, and Hungary, we focus on ‘welfare thresholds’: moments where diagnoses do socio-political work, mediating access to income, legitimacy, and (time away from) paid employment.

Across welfare regimes, disability and chronicity are tied to work capacity in different and often contradictory ways. In some contexts, unemployment becomes increasingly medicalised, with diagnoses functioning as necessary justifications for not working. Elsewhere, the legitimacy of ‘incapacity’ is progressively eroded, narrowing the right not to work. In both cases, diagnostic categories are stretched and compressed by state institutions, third-sector organisations, and claimants, as people navigate repeated assessments, shifting expectations of recovery, and demands to present their conditions as either temporary or enduring.

These negotiations unfold within welfare arrangements where care, labour, and social value are continually recalibrated. Our paper attends to how different forms of knowledge within these systems are authorised and validated across intersecting value regimes and bureaucratic systems of healthcare and welfare. Based on longitudinal interviews with 20 participants per country over six months, complemented by digital ethnography, the paper shows how shifting thresholds around diagnosis and work capacity reshape identities, relationships, and imagined futures. Disability and chronicity emerge here not as fixed states, but as relational and chronopolitical effects of welfare regimes that variously medicalise unemployment, demand productivity, or withdraw recognition altogether.