Long-Term Cancer Survivors' Everyday Embodiment.

Long-term survivors of cancer (LTS) face daunting challenges to their physical, emotional, and cognitive well-being in the years following completion of cancer treatment. Most LTS face a new reality shaped by chronic "late effects" of treatments, or illnesses and conditions caused by chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, medications, and other treatments. Copious biomedical research explores the health challenges of patients undergoing cancer treatment, yet relatively little investigates the lived experience of LTS from a health communication perspective. Using Managing Meaning of Embodied Experience Theory (Field-Springer & Striley, 2018) as a critical embodiment lens, this study describes LTS' embodiment of health and illness. Critical qualitative analyses produced three themes: Bodies-in-relation, bodies entangled with biomedical actants, and dynamic embodiment. We discuss implications for health communication research and theorizing and for healthcare practice.

Defining Moments Telling Stories to Foster Well-being, Humanize Healthcare, and Advocate for Change.

Health Communication launched the "Defining Moments" forum in 2009 to showcase the social and material power of storytelling. On its 10-year anniversary, we take stock of how authors have enacted "Defining Moments" including what was narrated, by whom, and why. In eight loosely coupled thematic clusters, we revisit the more than 75 published essays to date, finding value in ways that speak to the emerging and enduring issues of concern for health communication scholars. Across the essays, the maturation of health narrative theorizing is revealed by the sheer scope of topics addressed, coupled with the expanded voices and ways of voicing experience. Collectively, these essays have enlarged academic conventions and offered diverse entry points for refiguring the experience of illness and well-being.

The poetics of professionalism among dialysis technicians.

The vast majority of care for end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients is provided by skilled (but not formally educated) paraprofessional technicians. Using Goffman's (1959) framing of the performance of self in everyday discourse, this study examines discourse from dialysis technicians and technical aides to explore these paraprofessionals' construction and performance of professional identity and professional communication within the context of an outpatient dialysis clinic. Themes of professionalism--individualized care, vigilance, teamwork, and emotion management--are illustrated via poetic transcription of interviews with technicians. I contend that such representation offers validity equal to that of traditional research accounts while embodying alternative representational strengths.

Embodied knowledge: writing researchers' bodies into qualitative health research.

After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers' bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research.

The performance of dialysis care: routinization and adaptation on the floor.

Previous studies of communication in dialysis centers primarily focused on communication between nurses and patients. In this study, ethnographic methods were used to explore the dominant communication performances enacted by dialysis staff members, including registered nurses, patient care technicians, technical aides, a social worker, and a dietitian. Findings suggest a dialectic between extreme routinization of care and continual adaptation. The dominant routine involved repeating the same preparation, treatment, and discharge process 3 shifts per day, thrice weekly for each patient. At the same time, near-constant adjustments to scheduling, coordination of tasks, and problem solving were needed to maintain the performance of repetition. The balancing of this dialectic has significant implications for new staff training and socialization, understanding the role of technology and routine in dialysis and in health care systems more generally, and in further theorizing the role of unbounded communication interactions in health care.