Lecture | Unfolding Finitudes
Crucible of the Incurable: Facing ALS
- Date
- Tuesday 25 November 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Unfolding Finitudes: Current Ethnographies of Aging, Dying and End-of-Life Care
- Address
- Online
Please register via the button below. The meeting link will be sent to registered participants one week before the event.
Register to participateOn Tuesday the 25th of November 2025 Dr. Anthony Stavrianakis (University of Paris, Nanterre) will talk about his book Crucible of the Incurable: Facing ALS (Cornell University Press). Dr. Dikaios Sakellariou will be discussant for this talk.
This talk is a organised by the Globalizing Palliative Care research group.
About the book Crucible of the Incurable: Facing ALS
Crucible of the Incurable concerns how people face life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Anthony Stavrianakis spent a year in clinics and with people living with the illness in the United States. He examines the multiple meanings of care in a context of a chronic, degenerative, one-hundred percent fatal, neuromuscular illness, whose most common duration is between two and five years. How do people diagnosed with ALS continue to "live as well as possible, for as long as possible" in accordance with the normative work at the heart of outpatient ALS care? Crucible of the Incurable shows how those touched by the situation of a person living with ALS bear this problem and this task. Given the sense of certitude around the diagnosis, given past experiences of those aware of its usual progression, and given the uncertainty of the disease's cause and its progression for each specific person; how then do people orient themselves to the experience of life with this illness, how to support those who are confronted with it, and how to provide aid or solace.
About the author Anthony Stavrianakis
Anthony Stavrianakis is a CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, University of Paris, Nanterre. His anthropological work concerns the logic of inquiry in the sciences, and questions of knowledge, truth, and subjectivity in the fields of medicine, art and psychoanalysis.
