Colleagues at iHuman – a large faculty research institute at the University of Sheffield, co-run by one of my academic mentors on this project – have put together an edited collection called Being Human During COVID-19, published by Bristol University Press.
I was invited to contribute a chapter to this collection, which you can read open access here. It is a very brief piece, which collects some thoughts pulled together during one of the lockdowns in 2020/21.
The chapter, Reflections on the Future of Life-Saving Stem Cell Donor Recruitment, discusses how the pandemic disrupted stem cell donor recruitment, pushing online a lot of the important community work that underpins consistent registrations. In-person donor recruitment activity is seen to be especially effective for recruitment of racially minoritised donors who might then go on to be somebody’s life-saving donor. Its cessation, though temporary, thus has had some important consequences.
“It is something of a cruel calculus that the very actions designed to save lives – lockdowns and restrictions on movement – stymie work that has its own life-saving potential”
Through interviews with practitioners, as well as insights from my ethnographic work with some of them, the chapter is intended to remind us about the value – potentially irreplaceable – of in-person recruitment work, which relies on a huge amount of interpersonal, physical, verbal effort to inform and reassure people and maximise the likelihood that they will donate.
I am grateful to Bristol University Press for working with my funder, Wellcome Trust, which mandates Open Access (i.e., free of paywalls) for all written outputs from the research they fund.
Mix and Match 