Rethinking chronicity: public health and the problem of temporality

Abstract

Epidemics of chronic disease are widely recognized as deeply rooted in economic, social, and political structures and their histories. Yet strategies to address them continue to drift further downstream, to the ‘modifiable risk factors’ associated with conditions such as diabetes, cancer, and hypertension (Glasgow & Schrecker, 2016). In the context of this seemingly intractable gulf between evidence and policy, this Special Section highlights some of the tensions faced by contemporary public health in relation to chronic disease. Bringing together research exploring chronic conditions from Australia, the UK, Puerto Rico, and Senegal, the papers in this Section all address the multiple, and entangled, temporalities of illness at different scales. We argue that greater attention to these temporalities might open spaces for developing and implementing public health approaches that take seriously the complex causation of chronic conditions, and which begin to disengage with an overly biomedical approach of individualizing behaviouralism.