Life journeys: The role of interior dialogue and expression in negotiating terminal illness

Data, including video and audio recordings, including of (i) people’s everyday lives and activities, and (ii) performative fieldwork techniques, that was generated through a series of methods (outlined in the methodology section) that were developed as part of the research project to provide empirical and data about the content and character of people’s inner dialogues in relation to different environments including (i) domestic space (ii) public space, and (iii) material/non-human objects, (iv) therapeutic activities.<p>Life Journeys researches and represents the process by which people diagnosed with a life threatening condition reclaim meaning, engage with society and establish a future while living with bodily instability and the possibility of death. In particular it aims to gain a better understanding of the role of inner dialogue and expression in negotiating the disruption of illness and make critical life decisions, eg considering treatment, suicide or radical life changes. Although the research is with persons with HIV/AIDS, the research has direct theoretical and practical applications for understanding how persons maintain well-being, healthcare policy and for other illnesses such as cancer.

To enable this the researcher will re-establish contact with persons living with HIV/AIDS - who he worked with during his original doctoral research in the 1990s, when AIDS was seen as a death sentence -in order to understand how people have learnt to maintain a meaningful existence while living with terminal illness.This will involve developing a new set of methods for researching the ongoing streams of inner speech, expression and imagination when living with illness.</p>