Chronic Illness Wisdom is Both/And

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This poem reflects on dual tensions that sick & disabled communities have to navigate during ongoing pandemic conditions. In particular, it addresses the chronic illness knowledges that people with post-viral illnesses already possess (the reality of chronic conditions after acute infections, the necessity of solidarity across bed space) in the face of medical and political institutions that refuse to know.

Introduction: Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy

There are four themes that weave their way through the research thread on Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy in this issue. First, there is concern with intervention—intervention into the politics and practices of social movements and intervention into the academy and its traditions of knowledge production. Second, each text is situated firmly within a recognition and appreciation of social movements as knowledge producers. Third, all three contributions are unequivocally located in an urban context and the contemporary condition of inhabiting the city. Finally, what emerges from each reflection is a commitment to militant research and practice, as one that keeps ever-present an awareness of the relationship of research to existing material social relations of power and a commitment to confronting and transforming these very relations.