Timescapes of Health, Illness and Care: Negotiating Contested Temporalities

This book brings together cutting-edge theoretical work across a range of disciplines in service of developing better understandings of the nature and experience of time in relation to health, illness and care. While the passage of time – smooth or otherwise – is a universal experience, it is often felt acutely in relation to compromised health and/or the need for care. These are key sites for understanding how time is managed and made meaningful in healthcare settings and in everyday life. Timescapes of Health, Illness and Care takes an interdisciplinary and international approach to understanding how considerations of time – its ontological standing, normative value, and embodied and intersubjective experience – are vital to understanding experiences of health and illness, the governance of healthcare institutions, and the cultures that circulate around (and often obscure) informal care.

Katherine Kenny is Associate Professor of Sociology, ARC DECRA Fellow, and Deputy Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies at The University of Sydney, Australia. Her work deploys social and cultural theory and qualitative methods to better understand how health, illness and care are understood, governed, ‘treated’ and made meaningful in clinical contexts and in everyday life.   

 Mia Harrison is a transdisciplinary Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health (CSRH) at UNSW, Sydney, Australia. Her work is informed by science and technology studies (STS), critical medical humanities, and sociology of health and illness. Mia's research explores the temporalities, places, materials, and affects of situated practices and complex social assemblages. Her work is characterised by critical and creative qualitative methodologies that extend across disciplinary conventions.

Anthony K J Smith is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Sydney, Australia. His work draws on the sociology of health, gender, and sexuality, with a focus on HIV, sexual health, and LGBTQ+ communities. Anthony specialises in qualitative methodologies, and draws on sociological theory, data justice, critical bioethics, and science and technology studies to understand health workforces, community wellbeing, and how biomedical technologies shape social life.