Monday 21 September 1-2PM via Zoom. Please contact Dinesh Wadiwel for Zoom details

Abstract

In recent decades, cancer survivorship has been reconfigured from a disease-focused outcome measure (of ‘cure’ or death) to an enduring social practice centred around living-with disease. In this seminar, I will discuss research supported by a recent ARC Discovery project on the changing landscapes of cancer survivorship to propose a relational ontology of the affective and temporal entanglements of living-with disease, Further, I’ll argue that the specificities of living-with cancer emerge as more than illness/caring experiences, but rather as instructive in contributing to a relational understanding of everyday life. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 130 people living-with cancer and their close relational others, as well as solicited diaries and participant-produced photographs, I’ll examine such social practices as ‘anticipation, ‘waiting’, ‘memory-making’ and ‘the cultivation of normalcy’. The normative and relational tensions that emerge within these practices often reveal the entangled nature of such seemingly discreet categories such as self and other, here and gone, and past, present and future.

About the Speaker

Dr Katherine Kenny is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Sydney. Her research draws on science and technology studies and social theory, and uses a range of qualitative methodologies, to better understand how health and disease, (or illness and wellness) are understood, ‘treated’, experienced, and made meaningful in ways that are often concealed within the dominant cultures of health, biomedicine, and care. Her research has been published in leading international journals including Sociology (2020), The British Journal of Sociology (2019), The Sociological Review (2020, 2018, 2016), and Subjectivity (2017). With Prof Alex Broom, she is the co-author of Survivorship: A sociology of cancer in everyday life, which will be published by Routledge in 2020.