Posts published in “The Body, Illness and the Practice of the Welfare State”

The Body, Illness and the Practice of the Welfare State

The welfare state encounters the individual through the body. It is through illness, disability, pain and exhaustion that people become patients, service users, cases and cost items. The body becomes an administrative object, while remaining deeply personal and rooted in lived experience.

This theme brings together articles analysing how bodily experience is handled, interpreted and often distrusted within welfare institutions. It explores the encounter between individuals’ lived realities and the language, routines and norms of systems. The focus is on healthcare organisation, social insurance systems, professional authority, and the practices through which suffering is categorised, assessed and sometimes denied.

The articles address not only healthcare policy or administrative regulations, but also the cultural and ideological assumptions that shape our understanding of the body: who is regarded as credible, who is expected to adapt, and which experiences are granted legitimacy. The body is understood here not as an isolated biological entity, but as a site where power, norms and institutions take concrete form.

This is a theme about what often falls through the cracks: that which cannot be fully captured by forms, guidelines or hierarchies of evidence, yet remains central to people’s lives.