Aims & Scope

Scope & Priorities:  

An umbrella guide is the focus on chronicity, care and change that comes with living with and/or working on chronic conditions over one’s life and careers. 

We prioritise first-person experiential narratives, and conceptual or practice-related reflective reports, such as through auto-ethnographies, or lived-experience-led qualitative research. This includes: 

  • Conceptual reflections on reflexivity and positionality in living and working with chronic conditions, including in research, development & entrepreneurial innovation, advocacy and policy development, program, health communication and service delivery 

  • Methodological experience, innovations and reports on participatory research, citizen science methods and projects

  • Lived Experience critical perspectives on health systems, employment structures, and vocational support, with suggested solutions for change.

We invite authors to consider how intersectional factors such as gender, disability, race, class, education, migration status etc, or other personal and professional factors influenced their experience and insights. A suggested list of topics is provided below. Please feel free to contact editors to discuss and pitch a particular topic that you may be interested to publish on. 

CORE THEMES (Transdisciplinary Anchors)

  1. Lived Experience Methodologies
    • Autoethnography
    • First-person narrative research
    • Participatory and co-produced research
    • Embodied knowledge and epistemic justice
    • Decolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methods
  2. Identity, Subjectivity & Illness
    • Life disruptions, navigating ‘new normal’, life aspirations on ‘work-life-illness balance’
    • Coping, adaptation, change and recovery narratives
    • Autonomy and choice in health decision making
    • Chronic illness identity work (e.g. invisibility, stigma, liminality)
    • Self-care and self-governance
  3. Cultural and Narrative Framings
    • Illness metaphors and storytelling
    • Mythic, spiritual, and religious framings of chronicity
    • Narrative medicine and expressive arts
    • Intergenerational transmission of illness narratives
  4. Health-Seeking, Navigation & Systemic Interaction
    • Diagnostic journeys and delays
    • Care fragmentation and system navigation
    • Patient–provider power dynamics
    • Epistemic injustice and testimonial silencing
  5. Disability Justice and Chronic Illness
    • Intersectionality and chronic conditions
    • Ableism in society, health, and work
    • Social model vs medical model of chronic illness
    • Access, adaptation, and dignity
  6. Resilience, Adaptation & Flourishing
    • Post-traumatic growth and transformation
    • Chronic illness and purpose/meaning-making
    • Wellness beyond cure
    • Joy, creativity, and resistance in chronic illness/wellness life

CROSS-SECTOR SUBJECT AREAS

Health & Social Care

  • Experience of care across lifespan and conditions
  • Spouse & familial; clinician, health workforce, community health worker perspective
  • Lived realities of comorbidity and multimorbidity
  • Community health and peer-led models
  • Palliative and long-term care perspectives

Business, Work & Management

  • Chronic illness in the workplace (disclosure, adaptation)
  • Sustainable employment and job crafting
  • Leadership by people with chronic conditions
  • Inclusive and compassionate management
  • Entrepreneurship and chronic illness

Public Health & Policy

  • Health systems responsiveness to lived experience
  • Community-based participatory policy models
  • The political economy of chronicity
  • Surveillance, control, and rights in chronic illness

Flourishing & Wellness Economy

  • Reimagining wellness from the margins
  • Chronic illness and the right to rest, joy, and pleasure
  • Holistic, traditional, and Indigenous healing approaches
  • Capitalism, productivity, and the value of slowness
  • Critical views on the commodification of wellness

Submission & review process:

  • Open review (no anonymisation of authors or reviewers), with kind, non-critical or judgemental, but developmental/ constructive feedback provided.

  • Beta-testing for iterative refinement: testing with 5 articles/ every 2 months for half a year, to move to monthly frequency.