Immobility and Medicine

Recent work in the mobilities literature has highlighted the importance of thinking about mobility and immobility as a continuum, where movement intersects with processes that might entail episodes of transition, waiting, emptiness, and fixity. This focus on stillness, things that are stuck, incomplete or in a state of transition can point to new theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions in social studies of medicine. This edited volume brings the concept of immobility to the forefront of social studies of medicine to explore how immobility shapes processes of medical care and the theoretical and methodological challenges of studying immobility in medical contexts. The authors in this volume draw from a wide range of case studies across the globe to make contributions to our current understanding of health, illness and medicine, mobilities and immobilities.
Chapter 2 “Lists in Flux, Lives on Hold? Technologies of Waiting in Liver Transplant Medicine” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Cecilia Vindrola-Padros is a medical anthropologist working in the Department of Targeted Intervention, UCL. She is the lead editor of Healthcare in Motion: (Im)mobilities in Health Service Delivery and Access (2018). 
Bruno Vindrola-Padros is based in the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. He specialises in material culture studies and is currently exploring manifestations of (im)mobilities in the neolithic period. 
Kyle Lee-Crossett is based in the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. He specialises in heritage studies and currently investigates institutional (im)mobilities in the context of collecting contemporary bio- and cultural diversity in public archives and museums.