Assembling Everyday Geographies of Survivability in Kidney Transfer

This thesis examines the everyday experiences and geographies of survivability in kidney transfer. Literature has noted that the lived realities of kidney transfer are characterised by precarity and liminality. Yet, there has been little engagement in critical discussions about how this precarity and liminality operate relationally, spatially and temporally in everyday life. Relatedly, biomedical approaches in kidney transfer reduce survival to statistics and metrics, ignoring aspects of survival that are situated beyond treatment adherence, care interventions and the individual patient. Using a new materialist, feminist and Deleuzian approach, this thesis addresses these gaps by exploring the dynamic relations and affects of living on and with kidney transfer. A contingent methodological approach is developed, which utilises interviews, observations and participant produced photography and elicitation. I begin by exploring how embodied experiences of survivability in kidney transfer occur across and between the intersecting registers of the bodily interior, exterior and body-in-space, where the role and agency of matter are ever present. I then investigate how everyday embodied experiences sit within wider assemblages of care and survivability and explore how heterogeneous entities provisionally assemble through kidney transfer care to enable or inhibit survivability. Lastly, I examine the ways in which experiences of survivability operate spatially and collaboratively through (dis)engagements with the wider world and a diversity of heterogeneous actants, agencies and relations. Rather than reducing survival to an individual, biomedically oriented scale, I demonstrate the value in attending to the intricate specificities of survivability; the situated relationships that people (re)negotiate with the wider world whilst living on or surviving. Overall, this thesis develops a conceptual framework for future research within health geography to attend to survivability and I propose four key elements that offer possible resources for challenging the ways in which geographers engage with ideas of survival and survivability.