AB1690-PARE SWIMMING TOURNAMENT FOR THE RIGHTS OF PEOPLE WITH LUPUS: AN EXAMPLE OF AGENCY AGAINST SLE
Authors: E. Calleja Macedo, L. Athié
Journal: Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases (2024)

<h3>Background:</h3> Since 2015, various groups and associations of people with lupus in Mexico began to carry out public activities as a call to the State to fulfill their basic rights and health guarantees. Among these activities, in 2022, the swimming tournament for the rights of people with lupus was organized. Since its first edition, and as part of a doctoral research, the observation of the social interaction of those who participated was carried out, to record whether the discursive and interactional behaviors meant a greater or lesser level of agency in terms of identity and the conception of future possibilities, regarding the disease. <h3>Objectives:</h3> To observe to what extent people who decide to participate in the swimming tournament show attitudes of greater or lesser agency in their interactional encounters, and how these encounters influence their future perspectives and encounter with the disease. <h3>Methods:</h3> Interviews throughout the events, direct observation, photographic recording and monitoring of some people throughout the annual tournaments, using Grounded Theory and Autobiographical Discourse Analysis. <h3>Results:</h3> To date, there is a corpus of images and videos related to the activities and interactions of the participants throughout the tournaments, as well as their testimonies after the first participation and in subsequent ones. This corpus has allowed us to observe how the practice of a recreational and competitive event generates, in the participating people, behaviors that allow them to position themselves differently in social life. Go from a patient/sick person to a person with possibilities and a future. <h3>Conclusion:</h3> The call work at the beginning of the tournament involved a great task of raising awareness about exercise, swimming, time in front of the sun and the benefits of testing oneself in an environment in which people with similar illnesses and symptoms coexist. Observation, throughout three editions of the tournament, has made it possible to identify clear interactional changes in the participants, mostly women. In addition, it has been observed how the levels of participation and the diffusion of female swimmers encourage others of younger ages and even cause some people who do not know how to swim to prepare a year in advance to enter. The behavior of mothers, fathers, couples and families, as well as the attention of the media, is another aspect that has been documented and analyzed. <h3>REFERENCES:</h3> [1] Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual review of anthropology, 30(1), 109-137. <h3>Acknowledgements:</h3> This protocol was part of the observation of a national movement celebrated every year in Mexico, and has been recorded in the research of the Postgraduate in Language Sciences of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities of the BUAP, entitled: "Counternarratives to discursive violence: The case of people with lupus". <h3>Disclosure of Interests:</h3> <b>None declared.</b>