The fuel that feeds the flames: Chronic inflammation and shifting conceptualisations of disease

Julia Swallow commenced a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award, ''The fuel that feeds the flames': Chronic inflammation and shifting conceptualisations of disease' in August. This 6-year qualitative research project will produce the first sociological account of the implications of chronic inflammation as ‘medicine’s new frontier’ for how degenerative disease is understood, approached and managed. In biomedicine, chronic inflammation has the potential to transform understandings of disease aetiology, improve risk assessment and prevention, and management for degenerative conditions. Public and popular culture discourse also emphasises an anti-inflammatory lifestyle to prevent and reduce chronic inflammation and onset of degenerative disease. These discourses intersect, as chronic inflammation is centred in disease aetiology, requiring a sociological examination which emphasises the mutual shaping of epistemic transformations in biomedicine with contemporary society. This project lies at the intersection of medical sociology and Science and Technology Studies, and involves conducting documentary and social media analysis, interviews and ethnography, across biomedical, public, popular culture and patient spaces. Focussing on four disease case studies - Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer, Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis - it will explore, a) how chronic inflammation is constituted in biomedical research, clinical practice, patient discourse and in public and popular culture, b) how it shifts classifications of degenerative disease, and with what consequences, and, c) how it impacts understandings, practices and experiences of disease risk, management and prevention. This project is amongst the first to empirically explore chronic inflammation and its relationship with disease, and to develop innovative disciplinary approaches to addressing the relationship between bench-to-bedside and beyond.