Stories of illness are often understood as attempts to tame, navigate, and make sense of the ‘wreckage’ or ‘biographical disruption’ that the experience of serious illness or patienthood may occasion. Within illness narrative research, the storyteller is seen as a seriously wounded individual trying to master the disruptive existential event of falling ill – frequently with the (sometimes impossible) hope of restoring health. This dominant “crisis model” has shaped scholarly assumptions about what an illness narrative is, who can tell it, and for what reasons, as well as how to approach it analytically. 

Against the background of this well-established tradition, this two-day interdisciplinary conference asks the key questions of where the academic field of illness narrative research is currently moving and how new experiences, discourses, mediations, and technologies shape the way illness narratives are told today. In other words, we wish to explore the multiplicity of ways in which illness narratives are currently understood, articulated, circulated, and used.

The conference particularly focuses on how new ideas, practices, and configurations of illness narratives emerge in cultural contexts shaped by anticipatory health technologies and the growing prevalence of chronic conditions, neurodiversity, mental illness, and increased medicalization. How are illness narratives crafted and shared if suffering is not only an acute and dramatic event but also something that lingers, changes from day to day, or looms as a potential future? What does it mean when illness and health become increasingly entangled and difficult to separate, when the narrator is not a patient in any conventional sense, or when diagnoses are replaced by risks and probabilities? 

Another focus area for the conference is the public circulation of illness narratives on social media, in broadcast media, and on streaming platforms, which turn individual stories of illness and suffering into public concerns and raise the question of story ownership. This concern is also pertinent in forms of distributed storytelling where experiences and narratives are shared across, e.g., families, generations, and intimate relations. In this vein, we also welcome papers that investigate how illness narratives are told by multiple narrators, by relatives, or by (genetically) at-risk subjects entangled in family histories of pain. 

The conference welcomes researchers at all career stages working within the fields of illness narrative, health communication, medical humanities, narrative medicine, and media and cultural studies.