I live with idiopathic emphysema. When I was first diagnosed, my life was about surgeries and hospital visits. But the medical profession lost interest in me once my health had been stabilised (even though my… Read More »Ill, But Invisible: When Doctors Are No Longer Interested
This roundtable with Jason Bate (Falmouth University), Michaela Clark (University of Manchester), Tracey Loughran (University of Essex), Chris Millard (University of Sheffield),Liz Orton (LCC), Beatriz Pichel (De Montfort University), Chimwemwe Phiri (Durham University) and Katherine… Read More »Images, voices, texts and silences: the ethics of sensitive sources
COVID-19 has amplified feelings of alienation amongst those who learn, teach, provide professional services, and research inside the University. In spite of the uncertainties of life inside the pandemic, institutional demands for the maintenance of… Read More »Ill-being and the University
The UK population has been asked to practice social distancing during national lockdowns. But one newly created category of people have been asked to pay special care to reduce their own exposure to COVID-19. These… Read More »What Defines a ‘Clinically Extremely Vulnerable Person’? Learning to See Algorithmic Decision Making
Autism Spectrum Conditions are not adequately accounted for within discussions of mental illness, disability, or difference. This is more than just a linguistic complexity as evidenced by media and literary representations that often misrepresent or… Read More »Invisible difference: autistic life writing’s potential to highlight the value of being different
In this work-in-progress paper, I read Hilary Mantel’s memoir as a chronic illness narrative in which ghostly (in)visibility permeates lived experience of undiagnosis (Kafer), epistemic injustice (Fricker) and the cruel optimism (Berlant) of normatively imagined… Read More »“My speech turned into a symptom”: Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost (2003) and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Contemporary culture is very familiar with the stories of hope and optimism that make up the classic anorexia autobiography. But this is not a truly representative image of anorexia. It is an archetype, developed over… Read More »Occult Anorexia: The Unseen Forces of Anorexia Life-Writing
In a society where women’s voices had been silenced behind oppressive traditional norms and restrictive social orders, and even bodies have been denied in the thick veils of religious hijab, the invisible bodies find a… Read More »Bulged Bellies, Silenced Screams; (in)visible aspects of pregnancy in Iran
Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls (1976) and Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother (1983) challenge the popular idea predominant in the socio-cultural imagination of a mother possessing the intuitive understanding about her child that helps her not only to… Read More »Psychic Severance of Maternal Cord And Devising Purposive Languages of Self-Care
Will we still need to be pregnant in the future? Depicting the development of artificial wombs alongside increased availability of surrogacy, near-future dystopian fictions provide a space to explore the outsourcing of pregnancies away from… Read More »Surrogacy & Ectogenesis: foetal commodities and mother-machines