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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.