This article explores affectivity, temporality, and their interrelation in patients who contracted COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden and with symptoms indicative of post-COVID-19 Condition (PCC) that remained one year after the infection. It offers a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis, showing how being ill with acute COVID-19 and with symptoms indicative of PCC can entail a radically altered self-world relation. We identify two examples of pre-intentional (existential) feelings: that of listlessness and that of not being able to sense what is real and not real, both of which, in different ways, imply a changed self-world relation. We offer an analysis of intentional feelings: how the fear of not “returning” to one’s previous self and the hope of such a return weave together the present and the absent, as well as the past and the future, in ways that make the future appear as constricted, disquieting, or lost. We argue that a phenomenological differentiation among experiences of living with symptoms indicative of PCC—through attention to the way intentional affectivity and pre-intentional affectivity help shape the embodied self’s attunement to the world—is apt to yield a better understanding of the variations within these experiences and contribute to clinical practice.

Phenomenological analyses of ageing and old age have examined themes such asalterity, finitude, and time, not seldom from the perspective of “healthy” aging.Phenomenologists have also offered detailed analyses of lived experiences of illnessincluding lived experiences of dementia. This article offers a phenomenological account of what we label as entering the grey zone of aging between “healthy” agingand aging with a disease. This account is developed through a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis of elderly persons’ lived experiences of being testedfor dementia through primary care in Sweden, i.e., within a cultural context wheredementia commonly is understood as a frightening a loss of self even though thisunderstanding also is questioned. To enter this grey zone of aging, we argue, doesnot dissolve dynamic self-becoming but can involve an experience of oneself as being old. Further, in the grey zone, the self experiences itself as neither fully healthynor as having a disease, and as needing to negotiate and live this ambiguity. Toenter this grey zone is to enter an affectively charged, sociocultural and medicalized zone, and while the self can still act in different ways within it, staying in thegrey zone can result in a re-orientation in the self’s mode of being, in ways thatare thoroughly beyond its control. To stay in the grey zone can have detrimentaleffects on the self, even though the self does not have a disease: the self can become“stuck” in a reflective mode of attending to embodiment, aging, health, and disease.

Studies of transformative change have been making headway in understanding the complexity of societal transformation processes. Yet, we lack understanding of how people’s lived experiences of transformations both shape and are shaped by meaning-making processes. In addressing this gap, we make two assumptions: Firstly, change processes comprise interactions between social actors that shape the way they are made sense of and experienced by the people involved in such interactions. Secondly, such change processes involve transformative experiences, which can bring to light previously taken-for-granted dimensions of lived experience. To address this research gap, we describe two complementary tools for analysing transformations: dialogical sense-making and critical phenomenology. These approaches share a focus on the experiential and sense-making dimensions, yet ask distinctly different kinds of questions and use different methods. Dialogical sense-making explores how people create meanings around transformations through various social interactions. Critical phenomenology analyses subjectivity, lived experience and structures that make possible and help shape experience. When brought into dialogue with each other, they allow for richer analyses of how the sense or meaning of transformations is constituted in experience.

Transformation studies lean towards the more practical aspects of change processes and are not yet dealing adequately with their personal and political dimensions. They are arguably constrained in doing so in their current stances, either fixated on systems and how to control them or on individualistic values and behaviours. In this study we show the range of actually-occurring societal transformations that people face can be usefully approached through a combination of dialogical sense-making and critical phenomenology. While distinct, these approaches share a concern with experience and meaning-making, concerns which are often neglected when societal transformation becomes abstracted and alienated from people’s lives. The two approaches reveal how societal transformational change is situated, shared, embodied and laden with diverse meanings. Dialogical sense-making expands the theorisation of the experiential, personal and political dimensions of transformation and shows how the practical dimension of change is always personal and political. Critical phenomenology addresses how the experience of transformation help shape subjectivity, as a lived relation to the world, and sheds light on taken-forgranted, lived norms about bodies and transformative change. Drawing together the three spheres of transformation – the practical, personal, and political - allows a fuller grasp of the complexity in which new worlds may emerge. Through a discussion of insights from these approaches, we develop a language and framework to understand how people interact with change processes. This development allows new questions about transformative change, based on a reframing of transformations that brings them closer to people’s lives. Together these approaches broaden and deepen social-science and humanities contributions to transformation studies and sustainability science. 

This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, for example, whom to test, when to offer the tests, and how to explain and perform them. This article explores the role and practice of this form of judgment, emphasising its political and ethical nature. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and patients, and draws on the theories of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt.

Vad får vi egentligen veta när vi genomgår medicinsk screening? Hur upplever vi erbjudandet om testning eller att genomgå screening?

Det är några av frågorna som diskuteras i Screeningens mångsidighet. Texterna utgår från såväl människors erfarenheter av screening som forskning och vetenskapliga diskussioner. Skribenterna gör nedslag kring exempelvis nationella screeningprogram som mammografi och gynekologiskt cellprov, men också screening för prostatacancer, kognitiv svikt och covid–19. Även hälsoenkäter som screeningverktyg och screening av genetiska anlag som kan leda till sjukdom hos barn lyfts fram.

I sina studier belyser författarna existentiella, etiska och socio–kulturella aspekter av olika screeningpraktiker. De visar på utmaningar som oro, osäkerhet, hur risk skapas och vad den gör med en människa. Tankar kring screeningens tidsmässiga perspektiv och den väntan som uppstår blir viktiga.

Författarna är alla verksamma inom medicinsk humaniora som undersöker människors sjukdomserfarenheter och vardagliga möten med medicinska praktiker. I den här boken fokuserar de vad screening gör med oss som individer och vilka utmaningar vårt samhälle ställs inför i det sjukdomsförebyggande arbetet.

MedverkandeMartin GunnarsonBjørn HofmannEricka JohnsonLisa LindénSofia Morberg JämterudMarit SolbjørAnette WickströmKristin Zeiler