ABSTRACT
Having heart disease and being at risk for further cardiac episodes highlights and elicits dilemmas that are inescapably social in character. In this chapter I show how the work of reskilling is not simply about achieving reflexive embodiment through relearning bodily and emotional experiences but requires interpreting and remaking social worlds (cf. Alonzo, 1984; Radley, 1989a,b; Williams, 1984). Social negotiations and interactional efforts to remake social worlds are as central to the task of reskilling as are physical efforts to strengthen and remake the body. As I proceed, I identify social and interactional dilemmas, and efforts to resolve them, that exist in interpersonal relations, at home and with family, and at work and with careers. My analysis shows that cardiac reskilling demands ongoing interactional work. Moreover, social negotiations involve various degrees of collaboration, compromise, and contestation among those who inhabit illness contexts. I call attention to social relations that constrain and enable “healthy lifestyles” and show how, rather than being determined, exclusively, by health knowledge or individual choices of patients, “acceptable risk” is achieved through ongoing negotiations in micro-political practices of power and persuasion.
