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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.