Transfer Beyond Transplantation: Exploring the Lived Experiences and Embodied Geographies of Organ Recipients

Abstract

This thesis explores the lived experiences and embodied geographies of individuals who have received an organ transfer. While geographers have long been interested in questions of the body, chronic illness and (dis)ability, and health, there has been limited engagement with the topic of organ transfer and the experience of receiving a new organ(s). Seeking to redress this, this thesis draws upon qualitative semi-structured and conversation-style interviews with organ recipients based in the UK. It begins by directing attention towards how space and time are experienced before and after transplant surgery, demonstrating that organ transplantation is not simply a curative event but an inherently spatio-temporal process. In response to this, I argue that the phrase ‘organ transfer’, rather than ‘organ transplant’, more accurately captures the experience of receiving a new organ by shifting focus away from surgery as a curative event. The next chapter centres on the discourse of the ‘gift of life’ and the related themes of guilt, gratitude, and reciprocity. Here I explore how this potent metaphor is embodied and experienced by my participants and what this can tell us about the appropriateness of gift terminology in relation to organ transfer. In doing so, I complicate the question of who gives the ‘gift of life’ by demonstrating that transplanted organs can best be understood as a relational organs, connecting organ recipients not only to their organ donor, but to a wide assemblage of actors, both known and imagined, dead and alive, and directly and indirectly involved in the organ transfer process. In the final empirical chapter, I turn to the Transplant Games and argue that these Olympic-style sporting events are therapeutic landscapes of social relations for organ recipients in three ways: providing a landscape of belonging, a landscape of hope, and a landscape of motivation. Ultimately, this thesis moves away from the UK’s current quantitative assessment of organ transfer and concern with survival statistics, asserting the value of experience-centred qualitative research for understanding and improving health and wellbeing amongst organ recipients.