Editorial:  ditorial/Editorial Diagnosing Injustice, Assembling Possibilities Editorial: Intro para. A Special Issue for the 8th In Sickness &amp; In Health International Conference Editorial: Body copy This special issue of Aporia stems from the 8th In Sickness &amp; In Health (ISIH) international conference that took place February 13-15, 2024 in Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand. Under the powerful leadership and vision of our friend and colleague Prof. David Nicholls and his collaborators, this edition was the !rst in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Privileging an in-person meeting for some much needed   gathering of minds  , this edition brought together critical health scholars and graduate students, both familiar and new to the ISIH community, eager to unpack global and local health phenomena. Much inspired by the organizers   post humanist and new materialist intellectual leanings, ISIH 2024 was a vibrant gathering that revolved around four resonant themes: diagnosis   destruction   voice   assemblage These themes are more than conceptual frames: they capture how healthcare is performed, consumed, controlled, resisted, and reimagined. They expose the material and symbolic terrains in which healthcare unfolds  from the intimacy of embodied experience to the broad architectures of policy, power and discourse. The ISIH conference drew together both seasoned and budding researchers committed to interrogating contemporary health systems, illuminating the politics of care, and unsettling normative assumptions about health, illness, health work, and healing. Mapped onto questions of equity, epistemology, and justice, discussions spanned a wide spectrum of critical questions: from the entanglements of technology and the body, to the legacies of colonialism, to the aesthetic and discursive spaces through which health is imagined, governed, undermined and reinvented. This special issue showcases four contributions that exemplify this critical orientation, each engaging the conference  s themes while inviting new ways to think, feel, speak and act as clinicians, thinkers, educators, and researchers in the health domain.  3   ditorial/Editorial Editorial: Intro para.  The !rst article by Keith Tudor addresses the !eld of psychotherapy as a site of tension, possibility, negotiation, and contradiction. Taking up the theme of diagnosis and its associated ideologies, the article critiques the rigid alignment of psychotherapy with dominant health paradigms shaped by WesternBody medical and regulatory frameworks. Through an incisive analysis, the article disrupts Editorial: copy binary constructions of   wellness   and   disorder  . The profession of psychotherapy, it argues, is at once inside and outside healthcare. In exploring the contested and fluid identity of psychotherapists as both healers and patients, professionals and dissenters, the piece reflects the theme of voice by foregrounding internal critique within a !eld that is both insulated and made porous by its own logics. The case of psychotherapy regulation in Aotearoa New Zealand exposes the risks of state-sanctioned registration: namely, the domestication of radical approaches under the guise of professional legitimacy. Here, destruction is both metaphor and mechanism, signaling the erosion of critical autonomy when professions become captured by medical orthodoxy. A second article, also from the Aotearoa New Zealand context, turns the spotlight onto the prison as a   subjectifying machine  , a term drawn from Foucauldian thought. This piece by Seán Manning and colleagues vividly illustrates how institutions shape identity through various forms of violence, containment, and exclusion. Centered on men with extensive incarceration trajectories, the paper dismantles rehabilitation models that presume  and seek to   restore    an autonomous, self-regulating subject. Instead, it suggests that the assemblage of criminal subjectivity, formed through adaptive performances of masculinity, loyalty, and risk, is less an individual pathology than a social, cultural and structural phenomenon. By resisting the !ction of the   agentive self,   the author underscores the limits of conventional therapeutic models, challenging us to confront the deleterious realities of carceral health. The article  s emphasis on power, marginalization, and identity in politically charged environments echoes many central themes of the conference. A third article brings a critical lens to the policy landscape that shapes the mental healthcare system of the province of Québec, Canada, where thousands of people continue to lack meaningful and integrated care and supports. Using discourse analysis grounded in Anselm Strauss  s understanding of social order as negotiated order, Pierre Pariseau-Legault and his collaborators explore how policy reforms have increasingly constrained the !eld of psychotherapy, with nurses in particular facing signi!cant practice challenges in a space governed by legal uncertainties and competition. Mental health interventions are increasingly framed as depersonalized and decontextualized technical  4   ditorial/Editorial Editorial: Intro para.  tasks, which undermines their relational core and erodes professional agency. This devaluation of therapeutic labour reflects, and perpetuates, a hierarchical system that continues to privilege certain professional voices while leaving others in precarious states. The article speaks powerfully to voice in Body the context Editorial: copy of policy-driven epistemic violence, as well as the obstinate maintenance, rather than the destruction, of outdated policy and regulatory frameworks. This enduring landscape exists to the detriment of revitalized frames for professional autonomy and the assemblage of care hinging on comprehensive relational community-based models. Completing this special issue is a compelling commentary by Kelly Gregory and colleagues on diagnostic delay in women  s healthcare. Here, diagnosis is not simply a seemingly neutral, wellrehearsed biomedical act, but a profoundly gendered, embodied, and political experience. Drawing on feminist and critical phenomenology, the commentary critiques the epistemic and institutional conditions that perpetuate and normalize delayed diagnoses for women across a range of health conditions. Importantly, it moves beyond cataloguing the reasons for such delays, asking instead who or what bene!ts from this delay, and how stigma and silence come to regulate women  s help-seeking behaviour. Through critical phenomenology, the author calls for a methodology that holds both structural power and lived experience in view, an approach that resonates with the ISIH conference concern for voice and assemblage. Together, these contributions o#er more than critique: they articulate alternative frameworks for the way identity is constructed and performed, to examine how care work can be deployed across a wide variety of physical, discursive and political spaces, and to imagine how health justice can be pursued. They expose how norms are reproduced, how subjectivities are forged, and how the boundaries of health itself might be redrawn. In their distinct yet overlapping engagements with diagnosis, destruction, voice, and assemblage, these papers affirm the importance of critical scholarship in a moment when healthcare systems are both under strain and under scrutiny. Mirroring the 2024 edition of the ISIH international conference, we propose this special issue as both a reflection and a provocation, toward health futures that are more equitable, embodied, meaningful, and responsive to social and political complexity. Amélie Perron, RN, PhD, FCAN Editor in Chief  5