Mid Sweden University

miun.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Breathlessness and Biosociality: An Ethnography of Living with Respiratory Disease in Later Life
Mid Sweden University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Psychology and Social Work.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4710-4926
2023 (English)In: Program Abstracts from The GSA 2023 Annual Scientific Meeting: "Building Bridges > Catalyzing Research > Empowering All Ages”, Oxford University Press (OUP) , 2023, Vol. 7, p. 577-577Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Sustainable development
Hållbar utveckling
Abstract [en]

This paper is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted predominantly amongst support groups for older people with respiratory disease in the North of England, and sheds light on how communities are formed around chronic breathlessness. By utilising (and reconceptualising) the postmodern framework of biosociality, this paper explores how people living with respiratory disease negotiate and incorporate different kinds of health-related knowledge in their everyday lives—explicitly in support group settings outside of the clinic. People are living longer than ever before according to the World Health Organization, and chronic conditions are now the chief causes of death globally and have surfaced as major causes of disability and functional dependency. More specifically, in the United Kingdom 115,000 people die each year of chronic respiratory disease, which makes it one of the three biggest killer disease areas in the country. These mortality figures have remained stagnant for the past decades. What is more, in the era of neoliberalism respiratory care is individualised. Public health responses now emphasise the responsibility of individuals over collective or institutional responsibility, which is predominantly enforced through self-care and by training (or activating) patients in taking their medications and monitoring their pulmonary performance. By attending to public health responses in neoliberal times where respiratory healthcare regimens are habitually individualised, this paper contributes to understandings of biomedical subjectivities. Explicitly, it examines how support groups—as biosocial gatherings—can be understood as technologies for bridging dialogues between subjective and collective bodily experiences of health, illness, and wellbeing.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Oxford University Press (OUP) , 2023. Vol. 7, p. 577-577
Series
Innovation in Aging ; Volume 7, Issue Supplement 1
National Category
Public Health, Global Health and Social Medicine Gerontology, specialising in Medical and Health Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-51263DOI: 10.1093/geroni/igad104.1889OAI: oai:DiVA.org:miun-51263DiVA, id: diva2:1856140
Conference
Gerontological Society of America (GSA) Annual Scientific Meeting, Tampa, Florida, USA, November 8-12, 2023
Available from: 2024-05-06 Created: 2024-05-06 Last updated: 2025-02-27Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Other links

Publisher's full text

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Nyman, Fredrik
By organisation
Department of Psychology and Social Work
Public Health, Global Health and Social MedicineGerontology, specialising in Medical and Health Sciences

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 30 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf