C Kierans
Biographic Data
| ID | 8603 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Kierans |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Kierans |
| SIGNATURE | KIERANS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7268-4438 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 103 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Failing kidneys
Chronic kidney disease of non-traditional cause (CKDnt) is commonly associated with monocropping agriculture, heat stress and impoverished working conditions, referred to as CKDnt "hotspots." The condition is also emerging in various sites of environmental contamination, raising questions as to whether multiple variants of the condition exist as a result of different ecologies and different human-environment interactions. This paper examines the …
Doing things with description
In a number of linked articles and monographs over the last decade (e.g. Love, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017), literary scholar and critic Heather Love has called for a descriptive (re)turn in the humanities, repeatedly taking up examples of descriptive methods in the social sciences as exemplifying what that (re)turn might look like and achieve. Those of us working as sociologists, anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars and rese…
Describing chronic kidney disease of unknown origin
Focusing on 'chronic kidney disease of unknown origin' (CKDu), this paper revisits ethnographic preoccupations with 'thin' and 'thick' descriptions in the context of the unexplained emergence of this unruly disease. CKDu has recently emerged in impoverished sites across the Global South as a 'medical enigma' that defies easy description. Despite growing research efforts from various quarters, however, the search for specific causes using conventi…
The Intimate Uncertainties of Kidney Care
Today the social and material situations of sick bodies are increasingly and intimately bound up with the variable moral economies of national healthcare systems in uncertain and contrastive ways. I approach these ‘intimate uncertainties’ comparatively and methodologically by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on transplant medicine in Mexico in order to interrogate European healthcare, specifically the UK. The UK National Health Service is an exe…
Renal Care in an Unequal World
Cultivating ambivalence
Anthropologists' longstanding ambivalence toward political advocacy has, in recent years, come under sustained fire-a shift that is often framed in terms of the discipline's "moral turn." In this essay, we make a case for the value of ambivalence, asking what lessons it yields as a methodological heuristic. Tracing the history of the concept, we argue that anthropology was founded on an epistemological ambivalence regarding its orientation to soc…
Ageing, masculinity and Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease (PD) presents as an illness which predominantly affects older men. However older men's lived experiences ofPD, including how they are influenced by age and gender relations has seen little empirical study. Drawing on Watson's male body schema, this paper explores how men engage with masculinities and ageing in order to make sense and meaning fromPD. Data is presented from 30 narrative and semi structured interviews with 15 men…
Organ donation, ethnicity and the negotiation of death
The introduction of end-of-life care criteria in the UK aims at standardising the processes of care at the end of life, including how medical decisions on death are communicated to the families of dying and (brain) dead patients. In the setting of the intensive care unit, these activities are routinely complicated by the imperative to secure donor organs for transplantation: where recent changes to donation services have seen the accommodation of…
Biopolitics and Capital
Organ transplantation has been central to debates on medical technologies and their complex biopolitical consequences, new forms of medical governance and new opportunities for capital. Attending to transplantation has also opened up new ways of thinking about, acting on and living 'in' the body, raising important questions about what it means to be embodied under particular cultural conditions. The specific ways in which a technology like transp…
The emergence of the 'ethnic donor
Organ donation is constructed in the UK as a public responsibility, but more particularly as an obligation for members of minority ethnic communities. This paper draws attention to the ways in which 'ethnicity' has been made problematic by the allocation practices of transplant medicine, health promotion discourses and policy developments. Taken together, they have served to culturalise and racialise the procurement of organs. As the problem of o…
Organ donation, genetics, race and culture
Within transplant medicine in the UK, the relationship between organ donation and ethnicity has been characterized as problematic, with a specific focus on the apparent reluctance of black and Asian people in Britain to act as blood and organ donors. In this article, we show that transplant medicine, in trying to work out a solution to this ‘problem’, has culturalized the issue by treating it as something that falls outside its own domain of prac…
Anthropology, organ transplantation and the immune system
The 'Social Life' of Scouse
Questions of heritage, tradition and authenticity have been pushed to the fore by attempts to engineer a cultural and social 'renaissance' in the city of Liverpool, particularly in light of its recent European Capital of Culture status in 2008. Much of this reinvention has been discursive, asserting continuities with a re-imagined globalized, polyethnic and merchant past. This discursive turn has encouraged a resurgence of interest in the symboli…
Descriptions as data
This article examines some general issues around the use of data in social research by taking an extended look at how drawings and text have been used in ‘draw and write’ research. With reference to a split between positivist and interpretivist studies, the authors argue that the problems generated by draw and write research reflect what has been described as a ‘crisis of representation’ in social research more broadly. With reference to descript…
Critical reflections on the field of tobacco research
In recent years, tobacco research, as a field of investigative practices, has come to be seen as a major contributor to broader tobacco control efforts and a ‘significant component of the global health agenda’ (World Health Organization (1999 World Health Organisation. 1999. Confronting the epidemic: A global agenda for tobacco control research, Geneva: WHO. [Google Scholar]). Confronting the epidemic: A Global Agenda For Tobacco Control Research…
Lies, damned lies and statistics? Reliability and personal accounts of smoking among young people
Narrating Kidney Disease
Culture and the state
This paper analyses some of the activities of a community development group connected to a very poor neighbourhood in Dublin, Ireland within the context of anti-poverty discourses and types of targeted funding generated by the European Union. Community development groups and discourses are saturated with terms such as the 'social market', 'inclusion' and 'community' that are an interesting combination of progressive politics and concepts recogniz…
Sensory and narrative identity
This paper explores the lived experiences of End Stage Renal Failure. It charts the experiential shifts across the trajectories of this chronic condition and investigates a phenomenological re-creation of body and realignment of self. Meaning is culturally produced, mediated by body and senses, illuminating the relationship between self and society. The point of departure for this paper is not the established criteria of diagnosis, but that of se…
Cultivating ambivalence
Anthropologists' longstanding ambivalence toward political advocacy has, in recent years, come under sustained fire-a shift that is often framed in terms of the discipline's "moral turn." In this essay, we make a case for the value of ambivalence, asking what lessons it yields as a methodological heuristic. Tracing the history of the concept, we argue that anthropology was founded on an epistemological ambivalence regarding its orientation to soc…
Narrating Kidney Disease
Anthropology, organ transplantation and the immune system
Sensory and narrative identity
This paper explores the lived experiences of End Stage Renal Failure. It charts the experiential shifts across the trajectories of this chronic condition and investigates a phenomenological re-creation of body and realignment of self. Meaning is culturally produced, mediated by body and senses, illuminating the relationship between self and society. The point of departure for this paper is not the established criteria of diagnosis, but that of se…
Organ donation, genetics, race and culture
Within transplant medicine in the UK, the relationship between organ donation and ethnicity has been characterized as problematic, with a specific focus on the apparent reluctance of black and Asian people in Britain to act as blood and organ donors. In this article, we show that transplant medicine, in trying to work out a solution to this ‘problem’, has culturalized the issue by treating it as something that falls outside its own domain of prac…
Culture and the state
This paper analyses some of the activities of a community development group connected to a very poor neighbourhood in Dublin, Ireland within the context of anti-poverty discourses and types of targeted funding generated by the European Union. Community development groups and discourses are saturated with terms such as the 'social market', 'inclusion' and 'community' that are an interesting combination of progressive politics and concepts recogniz…
Doing things with description
In a number of linked articles and monographs over the last decade (e.g. Love, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017), literary scholar and critic Heather Love has called for a descriptive (re)turn in the humanities, repeatedly taking up examples of descriptive methods in the social sciences as exemplifying what that (re)turn might look like and achieve. Those of us working as sociologists, anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars and rese…
Organ donation, ethnicity and the negotiation of death
The introduction of end-of-life care criteria in the UK aims at standardising the processes of care at the end of life, including how medical decisions on death are communicated to the families of dying and (brain) dead patients. In the setting of the intensive care unit, these activities are routinely complicated by the imperative to secure donor organs for transplantation: where recent changes to donation services have seen the accommodation of…
Biopolitics and Capital
Organ transplantation has been central to debates on medical technologies and their complex biopolitical consequences, new forms of medical governance and new opportunities for capital. Attending to transplantation has also opened up new ways of thinking about, acting on and living 'in' the body, raising important questions about what it means to be embodied under particular cultural conditions. The specific ways in which a technology like transp…
Lies, damned lies and statistics? Reliability and personal accounts of smoking among young people
Ageing, masculinity and Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease (PD) presents as an illness which predominantly affects older men. However older men's lived experiences ofPD, including how they are influenced by age and gender relations has seen little empirical study. Drawing on Watson's male body schema, this paper explores how men engage with masculinities and ageing in order to make sense and meaning fromPD. Data is presented from 30 narrative and semi structured interviews with 15 men…
The emergence of the 'ethnic donor
Organ donation is constructed in the UK as a public responsibility, but more particularly as an obligation for members of minority ethnic communities. This paper draws attention to the ways in which 'ethnicity' has been made problematic by the allocation practices of transplant medicine, health promotion discourses and policy developments. Taken together, they have served to culturalise and racialise the procurement of organs. As the problem of o…
Failing kidneys
Chronic kidney disease of non-traditional cause (CKDnt) is commonly associated with monocropping agriculture, heat stress and impoverished working conditions, referred to as CKDnt "hotspots." The condition is also emerging in various sites of environmental contamination, raising questions as to whether multiple variants of the condition exist as a result of different ecologies and different human-environment interactions. This paper examines the …
Describing chronic kidney disease of unknown origin
Focusing on 'chronic kidney disease of unknown origin' (CKDu), this paper revisits ethnographic preoccupations with 'thin' and 'thick' descriptions in the context of the unexplained emergence of this unruly disease. CKDu has recently emerged in impoverished sites across the Global South as a 'medical enigma' that defies easy description. Despite growing research efforts from various quarters, however, the search for specific causes using conventi…
The 'Social Life' of Scouse
Questions of heritage, tradition and authenticity have been pushed to the fore by attempts to engineer a cultural and social 'renaissance' in the city of Liverpool, particularly in light of its recent European Capital of Culture status in 2008. Much of this reinvention has been discursive, asserting continuities with a re-imagined globalized, polyethnic and merchant past. This discursive turn has encouraged a resurgence of interest in the symboli…
Sensory and narrative identity
This paper explores the lived experiences of End Stage Renal Failure. It charts the experiential shifts across the trajectories of this chronic condition and investigates a phenomenological re-creation of body and realignment of self. Meaning is culturally produced, mediated by body and senses, illuminating the relationship between self and society. The point of departure for this paper is not the established criteria of diagnosis, but that of se…
Culture and the state
This paper analyses some of the activities of a community development group connected to a very poor neighbourhood in Dublin, Ireland within the context of anti-poverty discourses and types of targeted funding generated by the European Union. Community development groups and discourses are saturated with terms such as the 'social market', 'inclusion' and 'community' that are an interesting combination of progressive politics and concepts recogniz…
Narrating Kidney Disease
Lies, damned lies and statistics? Reliability and personal accounts of smoking among young people
Descriptions as data
This article examines some general issues around the use of data in social research by taking an extended look at how drawings and text have been used in ‘draw and write’ research. With reference to a split between positivist and interpretivist studies, the authors argue that the problems generated by draw and write research reflect what has been described as a ‘crisis of representation’ in social research more broadly. With reference to descript…
Critical reflections on the field of tobacco research
In recent years, tobacco research, as a field of investigative practices, has come to be seen as a major contributor to broader tobacco control efforts and a ‘significant component of the global health agenda’ (World Health Organization (1999 World Health Organisation. 1999. Confronting the epidemic: A global agenda for tobacco control research, Geneva: WHO. [Google Scholar]). Confronting the epidemic: A Global Agenda For Tobacco Control Research…
The 'Social Life' of Scouse
Questions of heritage, tradition and authenticity have been pushed to the fore by attempts to engineer a cultural and social 'renaissance' in the city of Liverpool, particularly in light of its recent European Capital of Culture status in 2008. Much of this reinvention has been discursive, asserting continuities with a re-imagined globalized, polyethnic and merchant past. This discursive turn has encouraged a resurgence of interest in the symboli…
Organ donation, genetics, race and culture
Within transplant medicine in the UK, the relationship between organ donation and ethnicity has been characterized as problematic, with a specific focus on the apparent reluctance of black and Asian people in Britain to act as blood and organ donors. In this article, we show that transplant medicine, in trying to work out a solution to this ‘problem’, has culturalized the issue by treating it as something that falls outside its own domain of prac…
Anthropology, organ transplantation and the immune system
The emergence of the 'ethnic donor
Organ donation is constructed in the UK as a public responsibility, but more particularly as an obligation for members of minority ethnic communities. This paper draws attention to the ways in which 'ethnicity' has been made problematic by the allocation practices of transplant medicine, health promotion discourses and policy developments. Taken together, they have served to culturalise and racialise the procurement of organs. As the problem of o…
Organ donation, ethnicity and the negotiation of death
The introduction of end-of-life care criteria in the UK aims at standardising the processes of care at the end of life, including how medical decisions on death are communicated to the families of dying and (brain) dead patients. In the setting of the intensive care unit, these activities are routinely complicated by the imperative to secure donor organs for transplantation: where recent changes to donation services have seen the accommodation of…
Biopolitics and Capital
Organ transplantation has been central to debates on medical technologies and their complex biopolitical consequences, new forms of medical governance and new opportunities for capital. Attending to transplantation has also opened up new ways of thinking about, acting on and living 'in' the body, raising important questions about what it means to be embodied under particular cultural conditions. The specific ways in which a technology like transp…
Renal Care in an Unequal World
Cultivating ambivalence
Anthropologists' longstanding ambivalence toward political advocacy has, in recent years, come under sustained fire-a shift that is often framed in terms of the discipline's "moral turn." In this essay, we make a case for the value of ambivalence, asking what lessons it yields as a methodological heuristic. Tracing the history of the concept, we argue that anthropology was founded on an epistemological ambivalence regarding its orientation to soc…
Ageing, masculinity and Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease (PD) presents as an illness which predominantly affects older men. However older men's lived experiences ofPD, including how they are influenced by age and gender relations has seen little empirical study. Drawing on Watson's male body schema, this paper explores how men engage with masculinities and ageing in order to make sense and meaning fromPD. Data is presented from 30 narrative and semi structured interviews with 15 men…
The Intimate Uncertainties of Kidney Care
Today the social and material situations of sick bodies are increasingly and intimately bound up with the variable moral economies of national healthcare systems in uncertain and contrastive ways. I approach these ‘intimate uncertainties’ comparatively and methodologically by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on transplant medicine in Mexico in order to interrogate European healthcare, specifically the UK. The UK National Health Service is an exe…
Doing things with description
In a number of linked articles and monographs over the last decade (e.g. Love, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017), literary scholar and critic Heather Love has called for a descriptive (re)turn in the humanities, repeatedly taking up examples of descriptive methods in the social sciences as exemplifying what that (re)turn might look like and achieve. Those of us working as sociologists, anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars and rese…
Describing chronic kidney disease of unknown origin
Focusing on 'chronic kidney disease of unknown origin' (CKDu), this paper revisits ethnographic preoccupations with 'thin' and 'thick' descriptions in the context of the unexplained emergence of this unruly disease. CKDu has recently emerged in impoverished sites across the Global South as a 'medical enigma' that defies easy description. Despite growing research efforts from various quarters, however, the search for specific causes using conventi…
Failing kidneys
Chronic kidney disease of non-traditional cause (CKDnt) is commonly associated with monocropping agriculture, heat stress and impoverished working conditions, referred to as CKDnt "hotspots." The condition is also emerging in various sites of environmental contamination, raising questions as to whether multiple variants of the condition exist as a result of different ecologies and different human-environment interactions. This paper examines the …
Sociology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Organ Donation and Transplantation (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works)