Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores living with type 1 diabetes as a biosocial form of living through the lens of the uses of diabetes self-management technologies and the entanglements between them and the experiences of the body and the self of people living with chronic illness.

Paper long abstract:

The development of chronic illness has been conceptualised as a particular kind of 'disruptive event or experience' (Bury 1982). This perspective opened up questions about the 'critical situation' prompted by the diagnoses and treatments of chronic diseases, which reconfigure the structures of everyday life and the forms of knowledge that underpin them. Consequently, they lead to in-depth transformations of the everyday practices and the subjective experiences of patients. In this paper, I discuss this biographical disruption in relation to the biosocial entanglements that the diagnosis and the experience of chronic illness encourage.

Drawing from an ethnographic study on diabetes (self-)management tools, the objective of this paper is to explore the entanglements between the uses of diabetes self-management technologies and the experiences of the body and the self of people living with type 1 diabetes. The analysis reveals how the body and crucial daily activities, such as eating and physical activity, as well as social relations and, in a broader sense, the environment of people living with diabetes are reshaped after the diabetes diagnosis and during illness trajectories through the interactions built with new human and non-human actors. These interactions among these heterogeneous agents hold new knowledge and engender practices embedded in biomedicine and clinical and lay experiences of illness. These processes produce a new form of living that we can define as biosocial.