Severe brain injury and boundary work

Based on the concept of boundary work, this chapter focuses on how people having survived severe traumatic brain injury construe themselves and the rest of society and how ways of enacting boundaries for these individuals is especially important for their constitution of self. The qualitative study rests on in-depth interviews with working aged people from all over Denmark 5 years post injury. Data suggests two diverse age-related constructions of boundary work. The older respondents reinforced collective norms of the typical brain damaged individual, thus manifesting strong symbolic boundaries at the level of both individual and collective identity. The younger respondents, however, who had more at stake, sought to affect the predominant stereotypes as not being able to work and thus transform their collective identity. The paper concludes that boundary work for people having survived severe traumatic brain injury is a continuous process even many years after their accident negotiating the official categories into which they are placed along with the types of discourse that sustain them although being relatively well rehabilitated.