Short Abstract

This panel considers how disability and chronicity are swirling categories and experiences in different realms of life, including the everyday. By examining how biomedical, moral, and political definitions collide, we explore new possibilities for care, belonging, and justice.

Long Abstract

This panel explores how disability and chronicity, often treated as stable descriptors, are unstable, shifting, and deeply relational categories. We ask how classificatory systems that promise clarity and fairness instead create new divisions between diagnosable and illegible conditions, between those deemed deserving or “deviant,” productive or dependent. How do the categories of disability and chronicity go together and what are the tensions between the two? Is there polarization? And if so, rather than viewing polarisation as a simple clash of opposing positions, we approach it as a dynamic process that unfolds through the constant making and unmaking of categories in everyday life. We call these sites of encounter and negotiation “swirling thresholds”: moments when biomedical, moral and political definitions collide, merge, and are reworked through people’s efforts to live, work, and belong within competing systems of recognition. Bringing together ethnographic research from diverse social, cultural, and geographical contexts, the panel examines how categories of disability and chronicity circulate within and between clinics, educational institutions, welfare offices, environmental movements, corporations, and digital platforms. These movements shape moral, affective, and political worlds, influencing how people understand their bodies and their relationships, claim rights, and imagine futures. By situating disability and chronicity within and against wider processes of categorical polarisation, this panel invites reflection on how classificatory logics produce difference, value, and hierarchy in a fractured world and what possibilities emerge when categories are destabilized or reimagined. This panel invites papers that address:

1) How do categories of disability and chronicity become sites of meaning-making, negotiation, resistance, or transformation? 2) In what ways do biomedical, moral and political categorizations reproduce or challenge social polarisation? 3) How can ethnographic attention to categorical life reveal new possibilities for belonging, care, and justice? And 4) What are ways of thinking disability and chronicity together or apart?

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
Propose paper