Department of Sociology & Criminology Seminar Series

HDR Work in Progress: Gilbert Knaggs & Imogen Harper

Via Zoom: Email Leah Williams Veazey for link and more information leah.williamsveazey@sydney.edu.au

Ageing Bodies, Rural Spaces, Precarious Times: Exhaustion and Endurance Amongst Rural Older Adults – Gilbert Knaggs

Gilbert Knaggs’ research explores how privatised responsibilities and expectations for healthy ageing are lived out in underprivileged rural spaces. In this presentation, Gilbert will explore how tensions between rural precarity and neoliberal valorisations of self-sufficiency can be theorised as spatially embodied endurance and exhaustion. Against the biomedical and neoliberal reinterpretation of senescence as a dynamic process and health in older age as obtainable through bodily discipline and planning (lifestyle, fitness, pre-emptive medicine), qualitative research is needed to examine how these changing paradigms of ageing translate into embodied experiences.

Chronicity 2.0: Young People’s Experiences of Chronic Illness in the Digital Age – Imogen Harper

Imogen Harper’s research explores the experiences of young people living with so-called ‘invisible’ chronic illness(es). In this presentation, Imogen will explore some different ways of conceptualising the experience of invisible chronic illness, and how we might incorporate theories of digital sociology and the sociology of social movements to understand emerging chronic illness communities on social media. Imogen’s research is situated in the emerging relationship between sociology of health and disability studies, and considers individuals’ experiences, structural difficulties in accessing care and support, and collective responses to these difficulties. In particular, Imogen is interested in how chronic illness draws attention to the precarious and temporal nature of “good-health”, and in turn forces a confrontation with the fragility of our health and bodies that challenges cultural norms which reach beyond health and illness.