A workshop on the politics of imagining a future with(out) chronic illness
Online workshop
19–20 July 2021
The call for participation is closed – but everyone is still welcome to join us for 2 public webinars from our workshop’s keynote speakers.
In this workshop, we invite participants to think with the politics of speculation and imagination when it comes to futures of living with, at risk of, or in treatment for chronic illness. What does it mean to speculate in the face of biomedical trajectories and policy developments that promise inevitable intervention, with an often slim or uncertain chance of ‘cure’? What alternative future orientations can emerge as a result?
Following a productive surge of engagements with the speculative across the social sciences, we seek to interrogate the limits and possibilities of imagining and opening up futures, from diverse subject positions and at different scales. Drawing on insights from across sociology, anthropology, STS and disability studies, this workshop seeks to move away from assumptions about the limits of a life with chronic illness. Instead, we are interested in the limits of technoscientific promise – the “curative imaginary” (Kafer 2013) and hype of “anticipatory technologies” (Erikson 2018) – while, at the same time, exploring the potentialities that emerge from diagnoses, prognoses, illness experiences, and care at the end of life. We are interested in how people with chronic illness anticipate the future, and how hopes and fears impact life in the present. How do medical programs, state policies, and systems of knowledge production foreclose and/or open up futures of “chronic living” (Wahlberg et al 2021)? And how then, can we understand the futurity of and in chronicity itself? What regimes of anticipation and speculation does chronicity produce?
We are seeking out empirically grounded accounts of the multiple ways people navigate and assemble possible futures, particularly when the boundaries of speculation and imagination loom: from creative improvisations for living well in the near-future with chronic illness, to the pragmatism or ‘magical thinking’ of biomedical experts in the face of failures to find curative solutions. Crucially, we want to interrogate the politics of these future imaginaries: how vulnerabilities and inequalities associated with chronic illness play into questions of who gets to speculate, where, and when.
Contributions may focus on, but are not limited to:
- Potentialities and limits of the imagination in chronic illness.
- Futures of care and cure (interrogating the high and the low tech).
- Affective and embodied experiences that move subjects towards or away from certain futures.
- Understandings of speculation across scales; as embedded in biomedicine, policy making, and personal decision-making.
- The ethics of opening and/or foreclosing futures with and without chronic illness.
- Methodological approaches to grasping uncertain futures.
Workshop format
This small-scale, online workshop aims to open up a highly engaged, critical, and creative discussion about speculative futures in relation to chronic illness. We invite participants to bring questions, challenges, dilemmas, and experimental modes of thinking/working with these themes – with an aim to produce new insights and possible avenues for research.
Participants will give a 15-minute presentation and each presentation will be assigned a discussant. All participants will thus also be asked to be a discussant for one of the other papers.
Please send an abstract of max 200 words to Dr Natassia Brenman [N.Brenman@gold.ac.uk] and Dr Natashe Lemos Dekker [N.Lemos.Dekker@fsw.leidenuniv.nl] by 21st June 2021.
Public webinars
Our call for participation in the workshop has now closed.
Everyone (not just participants) is still welcome to join us for 2 public webinars by our workshop’s keynote speakers.
Sign up here to receive a link that gives access to both webinars.
KEYNOTE #1:
Professor Ayo Wahlberg
University of Copenhagen
19th July 16:15 *
Calibrating Chronicity
KEYNOTE #2:
Dr Rebecca Coleman
Goldsmiths, University of London
20th July 16.15 *
Fabulating Futures: Materiality, Affect and Speculative Methods
* Please note: times are Central European Summer Time (CEST)
Both keynote talks are now available to view online for 3 months.
Contributing Artists
Romily A Walden and José Sherwood will be joining us for the workshop, further contributing with their projects on the speculative and chronicity:
Notes From The Underlands
by Romily A Walden
Notes From The Underlands is a performative text from the depths of queer disability culture. It is both a future-orientated vision of a sick, disabled and care-giving Utopia, and an urgent call to action in the now. The text is performed through video, audio, large-scale print and subtitles; challenging the notion that the body must be physically present (and abled) in order to perform.
Romily A Walden is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centres a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Their practice questions contemporary western society's relationship with care, tenderness and vulnerability in relation to our bodies, our communities and our ecosystem. Romily is interested in our ability (and failure) to navigate physicality, interdependency and fallibility both communally and individually. Recent work has shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art: Newcastle, Hebel Am Uffer: Berlin, SOHO20: New York, Kunstinstituut Melly: Rotterdam, and Tate Exchange: Tate Modern: London. In 2019 Walden was a Shandaken Storm King resident and will be resident at Wysing Arts Centre and HAU Berlin in 2021. Since 2019, Walden has been a fellow of the UdK Graduate School and Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences.
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Mesoamerican Futurisms
by José Sherwood
Collaborating with digital arts organisation FutureEverything, this practice-based PhD investigates how extended reality (XR) can operate as an immersive methodology to cultivate human (and more-than-human) transformations in Mexico City. Reframing XR as a shapeshifting methodology to co-imagine Mesoamerican Futurisms in Mexico City, this practice-based PhD will harness multiple perspectives of the past to re-envisage and disrupt futures more inclusive of its inhabitants.
José Sherwood (He/They) is a British Mexican artist and visual anthropologist with research interests in memory, storytelling and multi-perspectival myth-making through visual, sensory and digital methods. Since 2014, he has worked in Mexico City, investigating the ways in which families create and embody myths through storytelling. Graduating from the MA in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, José is the Visual and Sound Editor for Otherwise Magazine. In 2021, he will begin a practice-based PhD with the School of Digital Art in Manchester Metropolitan University and FutureEverything on a project called 'Mesoamerican Futurisms' which will bring together indigenous artists and anthropologists in Mexico City to explore the potential of extended reality (XR) as a shapeshifting methodology to cultivate human (and more-than-human) transformations in Mexico City.
Keynote Talks Available Online
Thank you all for participating in the workshop!
In case you missed the kenote talks of the workshop, or if you just want to revisit them, they are now available to watch online for the next 3 months:
Calibrating Chronicity
by Prof Ayo Wahlberg
Fabulating Futures: Materiality, Affect and Speculative Methods
by Dr Rebecca Coleman
And since several of you have already asked for it, here is a Reference List from Dr Coleman’s talk.
Workshop Organisers
Dr Natassia Brenman
Goldsmiths, University of London
Department of Sociology
Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP)
Dr Natashe Lemos Dekker
University of Leiden, Department of Anthropology
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology
