Paper short abstract:

Mobilising ethnographic materials gathered in a dialysis unit, the paper investigates how "quality of life" is crafted. It analyses both, enactments of quality of life and the tinkering with entities in nephrological practices, thus, providing an experiment in the making of normativities in STS.

Paper long abstract:

Since the first attempts to treat renal failure through dialysis, patient's quality of life has been a concern for nurses and physicians. While ethnographies provided by medical anthropologists (Kierans 2005; Russ, Shim, Kaufman 2005) have mentioned this issue, they have not studied it systematically. Drawing on the STS approach to turn normativities into an object to study (Pols 2006; Mol 2008; Thévenot 2002), this presentation, thus, investigates how in nephrological practices "quality of life" for patients on dialysis is crafted.

Mobilising ethnographic materials gathered in 2016 and 2017 on a dialysis ward in an Austrian hospital, I will first tease out how mundane goings-on of seeing and treating patients enact quality of life. I will then analyse how nurses, physicians, and patients tinkering with various entities, thus allowing patients to live as well as possible with their disease. My main argument will be that, while both ways of studying the crafting of quality of life provide valuable insights, it is the latter that allows articulating the concerns embedded in the mundane goings-on on the ward, what caring for patient's quality of life implies and what it does not imply.

Through the case of "quality of life", the paper will shed light on normativities in the making in a particular set of health care practices and suggest experimentation in the form of foolish storytelling as a way to explore the normativities that we, in STS, develop in accounts about them.