Hosted by the Palliative and End of Life Care Research Network in Bristol Medical School.
Abstract: From ‘bucket lists’ of destinations and experiences, to ‘flights of hope’ for experimental or specialised medical care, diagnoses of serious illness are deeply entwined with travel and changing perspectives on mobility. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 54 people living with cancer and 28 of their informal carers that were carried out during 2020 and 2021 (i.e., the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic), this talk explores the relationship between imaginaries of the future, mobility, and immobility in the context of a cancer diagnosis through participants’ narratives of travel contemplated, constrained, cancelled or completed.
In this paper, we draw on a thematic analysis of interviews with cancer patients and their carers to ask what meanings are attached to narratives of travel – whether completed or constrained, imagined or interrupted – in the context of a cancer diagnosis. Through this analysis of time and travel, we examine how normative expectations of how to live with or beyond cancer can produce tensions, particularly in the uncertain but precariously hopeful landscape of precision cancer treatments, with its shifting understandings of remission, cure, survival and chronicity. In paying particular attention to the contemporary notion of the ‘bucket list’, I consider what the notion’s popularity can tell us about how we think about living a ‘meaningful life’ and how these cultural norms play out in the realm of palliative and/or end-of-life care.
Bio: Leah Williams Veazey is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sociology at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies at the University of Sydney. She is currently working on an Australian Research Council-funded study, The Social Life of Death (2023-2026), investigating the social dimensions of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary Australia. Leah’s research interests include migration, health and care. She is the author of Migrant Mothers in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2021) which won the Raewyn Connell Award for Best First Book in Australian Sociology.
Join online: https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/96232658555