Twenty-eight injections, two visits, one meeting: cultivating new skills for injecting medicine for rheumatoid arthritis.

In this paper I examine the cultivation of a new skill through an autoethnographic account of learning to inject subcutaneously adalimumab for rheumatoid arthritis. Self-administered injections are increasingly prominent as part of treatment environments for a range of different conditions. The acquisition of skill is bound up with the cultivation of affects and sense-making that is dispersed across bodies, spaces, and objects. The performativity of instructions and objects are crucial for maintenance and processes of medicine. The body too is a crucial site for how learning is development and refined through a corporal engagement with the world. In this paper I explore how a new skill is learnt, developed, and coalesced. Building on recent work in social and cultural geography I argue that acquiring the skill of injecting medicine is developed through an entanglement of bodies, objects, senses, and times to create spaces of skilful learning. The implication for learning is that by taking it as a full bodily activity we can develop sensitive approaches about how we perceive, transmit, and create information. The careful consideration of how new skills are developed is essential to ensure new skills for the self-management of diseases.