5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The global burden of chronic illness, including cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes, and chronic pain, continues to rise each year. In addition to the need to consider the ways in which chronic illnesses bear on individuals’ everyday lives, equally urgent is attending to the institutional relations organizing forms of health and social care accessed by people with chronic illnesses. Institutional ethnography as a mode of inquiry is particularly well-suited to investigating how the world of ‘chronic illness care’ is put together and how it operates. In particular, institutional ethnography’s focus on ruling relations allows for attending not only to institutions that are typically understood as comprising the ‘health care system’ but also relations of policy design, governance, funding, professionalization, pharmaceutical research, development, and marketing, patient engagement, etc. that organize care for chronic illness. This session invites papers that take up the work of exploring, discovering, and critiquing the social organization of care for chronic illness. We welcome a range of contributions, including 1) empirical investigations of the relations through which chronic illness care is organized, including studies of ruling relations not typically understood as comprising the ’health care system’; 2) studies that identify forms of health work undertaken by people with chronic illnesses, formal and/or informal caregivers, and others; and 3) methodological papers that engage with institutional ethnography as a mode of inquiry for uncovering the social organization of care for chronic illness. This will be a regular session.