Well Years, Good Years, Quality Years – Calibrations and Aggregations of Daily Living: Daily Living

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Throughout the world low fertility, ageing and chronic disease are transforming how health/care is organised and practiced. Healthcare programmes are being reconfigured to address the challenges of treating and managing long term conditions just as persons with chronic conditions, family members and loved ones grapple with daily tasks of (self-)care. In low fertility societies there are fewer young people to care for elders, who are increasingly living with various co-morbidities and may require assistance in their daily lives. A wealth of instruments, indices and scales have emerged which take daily living as their object. Despite their differences, their commonality lies in their normative differentiation of the activities of daily living along better-worse continuums. Certain ways of living are valued as of better (in terms of quality, fulfilment, life satisfaction, etc.), based largely on a person’s functional ability, levels of experienced discomfort, and experiences of isolation. Contributors to this panel will critically examine how daily living, itself, has become the object of measurement as healthcare programmes, professionals, carers and patients seek to improve the daily lives of those living with chronic conditions. Ethnographic, policy-oriented and historical analyses of how daily living is made knowable and calculable on the one hand, and negotiated and tinkered with on the other, are welcome. The panel will contribute to STS scholarship on health metrics, health interventions and (self-)care and will further conceptual innovation at the nexus of medical anthropology, medical sociology and STS.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Well years, good years, quality years – calibrations and aggregations of daily living

Individual Presentations

• Measuring (what) Matters – Patient Rated Outcome and the making of experiencing patient publics - Henriette Langstrup, University of Copenhagen; Tiago Moreira, Durham University

• Unfixable Brains: Attaining Normalcy in Daily Living with Seizures - Stefan Timmermans; Tanya Stivers, UCLA

• Timing Care for People with Dementia: ADL and the Problem of Time in the Long-term Care Insurance Program in South Korea - Jieun Lee, University of Copenhagen

• From Drugs for Life to Living for Drugs: viewing hospice care from an institutional/pharmaceutical perspective - Wen-Hua Kuo, National Yang-Ming University

Session Organizer

• Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen