Disrupting, questioning and altering the taken-for-granted 'cosmos' of everyday life, the experiences of illness challenge the different ways in which social normalcy is remembered, maintained and expected. Using rich qualitative and ethnographic data alongside print and on-line media sources, this book explores the various experiences of life threatening, infectious or non-curable illnesses that trouble the practices and relations of human and social life. Challenging a mere deficit-model of illness, it examines how the cosmopolitics of illness require and initiate an ethos that cares for difference and diversity.

Contents: Introduction; Forgetting bodies; Stroked bodies; Infectious bodies; Conclusion: the social as event; References; Index.

Michael Schillmeier is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK and Schumpeter-Fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung. He is the author of Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses, and Things, and co-editor of many books including Agency without Actors? Rethinking Collective Action and New Technologies and Emerging Spaces of Care.