Personal interfaces: balancing work, family and care

​Modern society is founded on the distinction between public and private life. However, this porous, shifting demarcation often goes hand in hand with a second distinction: that between our rational and emotional lives. Superimposed on each other, the two distinctions have helped to structure our social order. One of the most typical examples is without doubt the way in which work is supposed to take place in a setting where emotions are ignored or restricted to moments outside the work environment.

The goal of the symposium is to contribute to contemporary theoretical and empirical thinking on the place of serious illness in efforts to reconcile our private with our working lives and our personal lives with institutional settings. Each of the presentations will cast light on the way in which illness and its different relations to time create uncertainty and tension between family life, work and caring roles. Since illness not only affects the patients themselves, but also their families and, in a broader perspective, the social environment, it creates areas of flux in professional relationships and the settings in which these take place. Thus it gives rise to habits and notions of personal life that are constantly shifting, eradicating or reconfiguring the distinctions between public and private life.

• Flyer symposium (PDF)
• Project description