John MacArtney

A poster for the project, either black on a white background, or white on a black background. The text says: “www.cripticarts.org/R&J Casting: Romeo & Juliet - Title roles & design creative - London - 2025-2027 Seeking ventilation users who want to be paid to train, perform, or work on an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet while adding to research into what it means to be living ventilated. No theatre experience required. Deadline 26th August 2025 Open to anyone who uses bipap/NIV/tracheostomy” At the bottom are logos for CRIPtic Arts, the Wellcome Trust, University of Sheffield and Arts Council England The poster contains a photo of Jamie rehearsing or performing. They are wearing a hospital gown and ventilator mask.

Do you use #ventilation (bipap/trach/NIV)? Are you interested in theatre? Are you within reach of London? Would you like to work on, or star in, a new adaption of Romeo & Juliet while adding to research on what it means to be ventilated? Find out more at www.cripticarts.org/R&J

Very sad to learn that long-standing colleague Mike Bury has passed away. RIP

@drbeckyevans.bsky.social 👆😀

Petition: Direct the UKHSA to monitor COVID infections that occur in particular settings Ensure that the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) monitors, and reports on, the numbers of COVID infections that occur in healthcare settings through its routine surveillance programmes, and advises o...

Data is collected on several healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) posing significant threat to public health.
We think government should ensure policy on management of HCAIs is extended to include recording data on COVID infections spread within hospitals.
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73...

4. Chronic illness is an economic category as much as a medical one. Every diagnosis comes with a price tag: who pays, who profits, and who is left to ‘manage’ themselves. The market extracts from our sickness while calling it ‘care.’

When you do history of medicine it's every other retired doctor and it is both wrong and tedious

This is why I remind people that 90% uptake is still very high (just not, epidemiologically, high *enough*).

Because we need to remember the vast majority of parents comply *when vaccination is made accessible and health professionals have the time to work with parents who might have concerns*.

Risk Factors for COVID-19–Related Hospitalization and Death in Patients With Cancer This prospective cohort study investigated the impact of COVID-19 on patients with cancer, including risk factors for hospitalization, treatment disruptions, and death.

“COVID-19 infection had a significant impact on patients with cancer, and risk factors for hospitalization and mortality were identified.”

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Ian Hacking · Making Up People: clinical classifications

Anyway, every day's an Ian Hacking day: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...

Big fan of social science that's, like, "there are seven kinds of person."

New article in Social Theory & Health, co-authored with
@judegreen.bsky.social, open access.

In a nutshell we argue that that lived-experience research is not the same as qualitative sociology in health research. The difference exists and matters.

Read here: rdcu.be/evZ7F

Student antiracist activists working with Hannah Jones @uncomfiest.bsky.social& Anna Numa Hopkins in Warwick Sociology, have created an online archive of student-led #antiracist activism, to pass on experiences and knowledge to future generations in #HigherEducation : warwickantiracism.org

Desire lines, queer cartographies and cartographic queers - Ash Watson, Emma Kirby, 2025 Digital technologies have enabled communities to map and (re)claim space in novel ways and at significant scale. Queering the Map (queeringthemap.com), a commun...

I am THRILLED to have a new article with Emma Kirby in @societyandspace.bsky.social

Focused on Queering the Map, we analyse how people contribute to this queer mapping of life – and become cartographic queers 📍💜

Open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

@emmawatsonkirby.bsky.social

Missed our conference opening plenary with @ericaborgstrom.bsky.social and @johnmacartney.bsky.social?

You can now watch it here ⬇️

www.bath.ac.uk/campaigns/mo...

Resources and recordings now available for our recent event on advance care planning. You can find them in the Open Thanatology Resources repository doi.org/10.21954/ou....

What does ‘normal dying’ mean? Are you a fully-qualified GP working in England, and do you provide palliative care as part of your role as a GP? If so, we would like to invite you to share your views on the meanings and values of understanding dying as a normal, ordinary or natural process in primary palliative care. Who can participate? - Fully-qualified General Practitioners (i.e. not registrars) - Currently involved in primary palliative care provision in England - Experience of palliative care provision as a GP (i.e. not as a palliative care specialist) - Palliative care provision must be in primary care settings: Home, care home (which includes supported living, residential homes, nursing homes etc) and GP surgery, but not in hospice or hospital. What is involved? - A 30-to-45-minute virtual interview. You will be asked about your experiences of supporting people at the end of life and what ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘natural’ dying means to you. If you would like to participate, or would like to know about this study, please use your NHS email to contact us (Dr Hyun Yu hyun.yu@warwick.ac.uk). Please provide your GMC number for verification

If you are a GP and would be willing to help a Master's student with their research project please read below!

It is a really interesting topic and one I think participants will enjoy exploring! 😊

#PEOLC #PrimaryCare

Visit the toolkit -https://www.mariecurie.org.uk/research-and-policy/research/mens-shed
And if you're interested in starting a Men's Shed in your hospice, please email hospicemenshedproject@mariecurie.org.uk

@johnmacartney.bsky.social and Research Nurse Rachel Perry have shown the benefits of Men's Sheds in hospices. Their funding will allow them to share their toolkit and host workshops to help hospices set up their own Men's Sheds.

🏅Announcing our awarded Research Impact Grants - 6/6
An essential part of the service: Increasing the impact of Hospice Men's Sheds to benefit men’s wellbeing

If you a clinician working in palliative care and concerned about how the issues discussed in this excellent presentation 👇 are affecting the quality-of-life left of people with life-limiting illnesses... Drop me a line (email or DM)

Check it out at: ddd17.sites.uu.nl/programme/

Epistemic preparedness Preparedness strategies for emergent infectious diseases have focused on microbial surveillance, medical stockpiling and healthcare infrastructure resilience. But what does it mean to be epistemically...

In BMJ Global Health, open access: epistemic preparedness. We argue for the social sciences and the humanities - expanding the category of expert - in preparing for the next pandemic!

#pandemic #epidemiology #histstm #histmed #sts
@nam.edu @humanitiesau.bsky.social @acmedsci.bsky.social @apha.org

Assisted dying – medical anthropolgist on the complex practical and ethical road ahead I’ve seen just how deeply people are affected when asked to contemplate their future – or the future of someone they love.

Following the vote on Friday in Parliament about assisted dying, here's a short piece I wrote for The Conversation about some of the remaining complexities when we look at how people currently struggle with prognostication and planning ahead. theconversation.com/assisted-dyi...
#AssistedDying #eolc

Home death as a conditional ideal: ethnographic insights from an English hospital Advance care planning is a process that involves ascertaining and documenting a patient’s preference for future care, especially in the context of end-of-life care. Based on an ethnographic study o...

New paper out - Home death as a conditional ideal: ethnographic insights from an English hospital. Written with Jennifer Rogerson, published in Mortality. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

NCRM News | Revisiting access and inclusion in research methods As a part of the Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Cultures (WAARC) project at the University of Sheffield, we have been exploring ways of making research more inclusive and accessible, and considering

A great blog post about Revisiting access and inclusion in research methods by our project friends in the Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture (WAARC) project at the University of Sheffield.

www.ncrm.ac.uk/news/show.ph...

BBC Radio 4 - Inside Health, Assisted dying: Who’s eligible under the proposed bill? In the first of our mini-series we discuss who could get an assisted death under the rules

As MPs will vote tomorrow on assisted dying in Westminster, here's a reminder that Inside Health (BBC Radio 4) have 3 episodes exploring the nuances of assisted dying and the current proposals (including some areas that lack clarity) www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

A copy of the book 'Recalibrating Stigma: sociologies of health and illness' edited by Gareth M. Thomas, Oli Williams, Tanisha Spratt, and Amy Chandler. The front cover of the book depicts a person out at night, lit by the light from a lamppost and looking at posters pasted onto a brick wall that are in the style of the 'WANTED' posters famously associated with the Wild West era of American history. The word 'UNWANTED' has replaced the word 'WANTED'.

We started working on this in 2021 and there is *finally* a physical copy of the book in my hand. It feels great that other people can now read all the great work that's in this collection.

It is available as a free e-book and in paperback:

bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/recalibratin...

Oh and Frank's paper on "Tricksters and Truth Tellers" might also be useful:
0-muse-jhu-edu.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/pub/1/articl...

But there is also a lit on the more ambivalent sentiment within "gift/illness" being "transformational"... which links to Sontag's "passport" and all those who responded to that!

👍 I did some work exploring narratives of "cancer as a gift" during my PhD. Your Q sent me down memory road... 😀 There is a literature directly critiquing the self-help/health approaches that use this narrative a lot e.g. Ehrenreich...