About the Project
Frictions of Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine is a transdisciplinary project dedicated to developing nuanced and relational understandings of what it means to live through solid-organ transplantation (e.g., kidney, heart, liver, and lung transplant). Bringing together clinicians, patients and families, and researchers across psychiatry, critical disability studies, sociology and anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS), the project also collaborates with artists whose lived experience of organ failure and transplant animates the affective, cultural, and ethical dimensions of these experiences.
The Frictions project illuminates the tensions, hopes, and contradictions that shape transplant medicine. We examine pressing challenges across the transplant experience including the ethics and inequities of organ procurement, the complexities involved in waitlisting potential recipients, the uneven access to psychosocial supports before and after transplant, the emotional, social, and clinical consequences of graft failure, and the shifting terrains of “life after transplant,” where cure and chronicity collide.
Project Activities
By centring lived experience and bringing diverse forms of expertise into dialogue, the project aims to reimagine transplant care in ways that foreground relationality, justice, and the fragile, friction-filled futures that transplantation both promises and withholds. Our project mobilizes ethnographic, narrative, and arts-based methods alongside research-creation practices that engage, explore, and communicate sensory, embodied, and affective knowledges that are typically not considered epistemically credible or valued in biomedical landscapes. Bringing together diverse ways of knowing, including through arts epistemologies and artistic practices, enables a rich and nuanced exploration of the impact of the curative imaginary and technoscientific intervention has on the lived experience of sick and disabled people.