Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract/Objectives
This book writing project will use 10 years’ research materials on the regime of chronic illness practices to develop into an academic volume. This book will draw the insights from STS and medical sociology and use the method of the analysis of regime of practice to explore the five decade’s transformation of the medical regime for chronical illness prevention in Taiwan. The chosen cases are hypertension, diabetes and chronic kidney disease. This book will explore how the practices of the professional societies, researchers, policy makers, clinical participants, social organizations, and patients and their families contribute to the multi-layer fields of practices and configure the contemporary disease-scapes in contemporary Taiwan. This book will thus highlight the problems and possibilities of the regime, develop new perspectives on the issues on medical power governance, and explore the implications for the critiques of humanity and social sciences.
Results/Contributions

The writing plan for this book will be developed from the research data accumulated by the researcher over the past decade on the practical system of chronic diseases, and will be transformed into an academic work. The planned main focus is to use the approach of medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS) to explore the development and transformation of Taiwan's slow disease prevention and control system over the past half-century through the perspective and method of system analysis.

 

Chronic diseases cover a wide range, and in recent years, the World Health Organization has redefined them as non-communicable diseases, including all non-communicable diseases as traditional chronic disease categories. This book focuses on hypertension, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, which have an astonishing proportion of the disease population in Taiwan, and discusses how related participants such as academic societies, research, policies, institutions, clinics, social organizations, patients, and their families have constructed the current appearance of chronic diseases in Taiwan through multi-level practical fields over the past half-century. Many signs indicate that chronic disease treatment is a major problem in the current transformation of Taiwan's medical system, but it has not received due attention. Empirically, this book hopes to explore the formation and transformation of this system, to clarify the difficulties and prospects. Theoretically, it hopes to explore the medical governance and power issues exhibited by the chronic disease treatment system cases and to rethink the critical implications of humanities and social sciences research.

 

The first draft of the book, totaling over 400,000 words, was completed in June 2020, and was revised to 280,000 words in June 2021. The book was officially named "Depicting Care Landscapes: The Shift, Reorganization, and Imagination of Taiwan's Slow Disease Practice," and was submitted to the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica for publication in July. It is currently in the process of being published.

Keywords
STS、medical power、analysis of regime of practice、medical practice、chronic illness
Contact Information
林文源 教授 Prof. Wen-yuan Lin
wylin1@mx.nthu.edu.tw