Online seminar on 6 May, 2022, at 13:00-15:00 Eastern European Summer Time (UTC+03:00)
Changing landscapes of gendered chronic illness: Tracing chronic pain and embodied differences across patient organisations, clinics, biomedical research and public policy
Several ongoing societal and technoscientific developments are changing how chronic health conditions are treated, experienced and researched. These developments include global drug shortages, national plans to rationalise treatment and introduce unified treatment guidelines, digitisation of healthcare, and personalised and precision medicine initiatives. The seminar explores the changing landscape of health and illness through three gendered chronic diseases characterised by persistent pain: endometriosis, hormonal migraine and fibromyalgia. How do ongoing changes in treatment guidelines and the production of pharmaceuticals shape the future of managing pain? How is the connection between gender and chronic pain conceptualised by patients, clinicians, scientists and public health?
The seminar introduces and draws on research carried out in the project Gendered Chronic Disease, Embodied Differences and Biomedical Knowledge (GenDis) funded by the Academy of Finland and Kone Foundation and located at Tampere University. The work-in-progress presented in the seminar approaches chronic pain as an embodied, intersectional phenomenon and explores the temporality of chronicity through questions of age. The included talks approach the challenges of managing chronic pain through multiple sites: patient organisations and patient activism, clinics and clinical work, biomedical research on disease mechanisms and possible treatments, clinical trials and public health policy making.
Programme
13:00 Introduction (Venla Oikkonen)
13:15 Experiences of gendered chronic pain: First results of interviews with people with endometriosis or hormonal migraine (Lilli Aini Rokkonen & Venla Oikkonen)
13:45 Studying fibromyalgia activism and the challenges of patient-clinician encounters: a PhD project (Ahalya Ganesh)
14:00 Biomedical and clinical practices of managing endometriosis and hormonal migraine: An ethnography of biomedical knowledge production (Maria Temmes)
14:15 Parenting pain: an ethnography of pediatric chronic pain and its care in Finland (Henni Alava)
14:45 Closing words & discussion
To receive the Zoom link, please register by 5 May at the latest: https://bit.ly/38bJSbl