The task of caring for those with chronic illnesses has gained a new centrality in health care at a global level. We introduce the concept of "chronic homework" to offer a critical reflection on the treatment of chronic illnesses in three quite different national and local contexts: Uganda, Denmark, and the United States. A major challenge for clinicians, patients, and family caregivers is how to navigate the task of moving health care from clinic to home. By "chronic homework," we refer to the work patients and families are expected to carry out in their home contexts as part of the treatment of chronic conditions. Families and patients spend time receiving training by clinical experts in the various tasks they are to do at home. While this "colonization" of the popular domain could easily be understood from a Foucauldian perspective as yet another emerging mode of governmentality, this a conceptualization can oversimplify the way specific practices of homework are re-imagined and redirected by patients and significant others in their home surroundings. In light of this re-invention of homework in local home contexts, we foreground another conceptual trope, describing chronic homework as a borderland practice.

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Can we think of something like communicability or contagion in relation to diseases and conditions that have hitherto been categorized as noncommunicable? In this article, I take my ethnographic point of departure in the lifelong—and transgenerational—experiences of obesity, weight gain, and weight loss of four Danish families in order to show how kinship, relatedness, and dwellings emerge as simultaneously homey and alien contagious connections, when exploring communicability in the context of what is often referred to as “the obesity epidemic.” Analytically, I am inspired by the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels’ (2007, 2011a) phenomenology of the alien, and through an analysis of the tracing of the spread of obesity to kinship ties, Danish hygge and the places and times in which we live, I propose the notion of affection as a phenomenologically grounded theory of social contagion.

We open the special issue by asking: how are groups of people affected by similar conditions, even when these are not biologically contagious? This is linked to broader theoretical and empirical questions of how we are influenced by others and by the specific times and places in which we live. We describe the history and etymology of the concepts of epidemics and contagion and argue that we need to reclaim some of the pre‐Hippocratic meanings of these concepts. Importantly, we suggest a postponement, or epoche, of the negative moral judgment of these terms with a view to exploring what actually happens when noncommunicable diseases and conditions spread. We introduce a variety of existing approaches and argue that they have taken us only part of the way in trying to understand social contagion and cultural epidemics. The articles in this issue explore a variety of noncommunicable conditions that have gained global prominence as epidemic problems—diabetes, obesity, trauma, and autism—through perspectives and concepts from phenomenological and experience‐near traditions. This includes emic ideas of social contagion and contamination, intersubjective units of analysis, causal indeterminacy, as well as diversity and transformation in social contagion.

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