Chasing blood sugars: Metaphor, agency, and community knowledge in the Juicebox Podcast

This paper examines how people with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) use metaphor to construct agency, identity, and shared understanding within The Juicebox Podcast, an international platform for patient dialogue. It aims to show how figurative language mediates be-tween data, emotion, and lived experience, transforming individ-ual management into collective expertise. An embedded single-case study was conducted on 81 podcast episodes (≈ 953,000 words). The analysis combined Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the Discourse Dynamics Approach (Cameron, 2003, 2011), and Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2011, 2018) to identify salient metaphors and explore their cognitive, pragmatic, and ideological functions. Recurring metaphors conceptualise T1D as mathematics, a journey, a ma-chine or broken object, and a personified agent. These patterns re-veal how participants negotiate control, responsibility, and rela-tionality while resisting biomedical hierarchies. The conversa-tional medium enables real-time metaphor negotiation, fostering empathy and peer learning. Metaphor emerges as both a cognitive tool and a social practice: it translates quantifiable data into mean-ingful experience, builds community knowledge, and reinforces patient agency. The study demonstrates the value of qualitative, discourse-based methods for understanding chronic-illness com-munication in digital contexts.