This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project aims to explore the processes by which we attempt to create meaning in chronic illness. The apparent increase in and diversity of chronic conditions calls for better understandings of the spaces between health and illness that chronic patients occupy, often for most of their lives. How can we articulate the tension between the biomedical model of chronicity and its embodied experience? What language and other forms of representation can we use to map, chart and begin to explore the meanings possible within such spaces? What insights can these provide to inform better chronic care management? What is the relationship between chronicity and wellbeing? How do individuals, societies and cultures make sense of chronicity?
The project will critically engage with a number of core themes:
- The Borderlands: Definitions, metaphors and actualities
- Understanding Chronic Illness
- Living with Chronic Illness
- Giving Chronic Illness voices
- Coping with Chronic Illness
Related themes will also be identified for development and exploration. Out of our deliberations it is anticipated that a series of related cross context research projects will develop.