Health Sociology Review最新文献

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, states throughout India, headed by the Centre, backed punitive policy actions that took precedence over democratic norms. Securitisation measures implemented by the government resulted in harsh restrictions on citizens' daily lives, the imprisonment of journalists reporting the pandemic and its management by authorities, and substantial invasions of people's privacy through the deployment of intrusive digital technology. These problems are investigated by looking at how the COVID-19 pandemic functioned as justification for authorities to violate democratic procedures as a consequence of the pandemic itself being characterised as a state of exception necessitating such ostensible measures. It is also demonstrated how securitisation as a means to monitor health, and health as a reason for greater securitisation, came to the fore in state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this paper, we explore negotiations around sexuality and gender diverse identities together with sexual practices, and the materialities of bodies, as they relate to the sampling and recruitment of LGBTQ+ participants in health social science research. The basis of our research note is a reflection on our experiences of undertaking a study on the social dimensions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the context of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). We aimed to identify tensions and important considerations in the sampling and recruitment of LGBTQ+ populations in health and social science research. Recognising the fluidity and diversity of gender and sexuality, the multiple meanings attached to them, and the proliferation of gender and sexuality identifiers, we argue for the critical importance of reflexivity in curating a sampling frame, which is respectful of LGBTQ+ diversity. This contributes to the growing body of work that reflects on how to develop meaningful and informed approaches to do research with LGBTQ+ populations. We do this by complicating the often-linear presentation of sampling and recruitment processes within scholarly research.

The COVID-19 'hard lockdowns' in Melbourne, Australia in 2020 targeted public housing estates thus trading on perceptions of risk associated with public housing as some of the most stigmatised sites in post-industrial cities. This article draws on interviews with Melbourne public housing tenants on their experience of COVID-19 lockdowns to analyse the place of stigma in residents' accounts. Pairing Wacquant et al's (2014) concept of 'territorial stigma' with sociological work on the biopolitics of stigma we consider the dynamics of stigma, tracing how it functions to delimit community boundaries and justify pandemic containment measures. Residents navigate multiple layers of stigma, including stereotypes of public housing, normative judgements of neighbouring residents, and a broader public housing system riven with structural issues. Members of these communities are both the targets of stigma and seek to distance themselves from those seen as vectors of stigma. Our participants report mobilising social distancing strategies couched in normative assessments of perceived risk based on physical appearance, presumed drug use and past conduct. We explore the implications of these enactments of territorial stigma and trace the logics of abjection that construct public housing as deprived urban zones, home to abject 'Others' perceived as threatening the health of the community.

Benzodiazepines are a class of drug extensively used in palliative care. Their use has predominantly been studied within a biomedical framework. Our study instead focused on the sociocultural aspects of benzodiazepine practices. We aimed to explore clinicians, patients and family members' values, beliefs, knowledge and feelings regarding use of benzodiazepines, including in-situ clinical decision-making processes, affects and actions. Social theory understandings of affect, the body and of suffering provided the theoretical lens through which data were analysed. Analysis generated the following themes: (1) A special specialty; (2) The suffering body and the moral imperative to 'settle; (3) The liminal body - living and dying; and (4) Organizational realities. Use of benzodiazepines were largely governed by social and moral norms, cultural expectations and organizational realities as part of affective assemblages of care.

This article aims to provide an illustrated account of layered stigmatisation processes and consequences for those who experience chronic pain and accompanying suicidality. Using constructivist grounded theory, I draw from 20 in-depth interviews conducted from 2022 to 2023 to explore how chronic pain and suicidality operate within people's social worlds. Findings demonstrate how layered stigmatising processes, occurring based on chronic pain and suicidality, operate consistently across multiple social arenas to create interactional troubles, which result in enduring negative social, emotional, and financial impacts. Three themes were constructed, including (1) self-stigma and the multiple roles of the family, (2) missed connections, and (3) anticipated stigma and workplace discrimination. Taken together, themes support the overarching category, 'interactional troubles'. Findings suggest a need for attunement to stigmatising processes' omnipresence and the depth of their consequences. Clinical interventions may benefit from emphasizing participants' social worlds and incorporating the complexity of navigating social arenas given layered stigmatisation. Moreover, policies that support those with chronic pain and mental illness could offset the long-term negative economic consequences of discrimination.

People living with life-limiting illnesses often talk about their ideal experience of 'care' as one where the care itself is hidden. Situated in the sociological literature on places and materialities of palliative care, in this paper I examine the hiding of care in a small, non-clinical respite house in an Australian city. Care is hidden by the at-homeness that staff, guests and volunteers alike all do. Working with Oldenburg's notion of 'third places,' I show how in this illness context the separation between home, work and other places in the community can blur, with respite services 'standing in' for the family home, or acting as a 'homely' extension of the hospital. Such places meet diverse needs beyond pure sociability as in Oldenburg's original conceptualisation.

Multidisciplinary team meetings are part of the everyday working life of palliative care staff. Based on ethnographic material from community and hospital palliative care teams in England, this article examines these meetings as dynamic routines. Although intended to have a prescribed format to review deaths and collect standardised information to monitor service performance, in practice, the content and conduct of the meetings were fluid, reflecting how this structure did not always match the concerns held by the team. The meetings provided a means for the team to collectively enact and weigh up different values through distributing the care and responsibility for individual patients across the team; jointly 'feeling their way' to determine what care should be offered and in what form; and by caring for their own professional wellbeing in the context of metric-driven healthcare. We observed how staff experienced tensions in 'documenting care' because of a concern that this misrepresented what they felt were core aspects of their role. Whilst team meetings may be considered a formal, routine part of teamwork and care, we interpret them as a dynamic social practice during which palliative care teams continually question 'what really matters' and (re)make what palliative care practice should entail.

While many sociologists have conceptualised medical and experiential modes of knowing health and illness, less attention has been given to the concept of empathetic knowledge. That is, knowledge derived from close association with others living with a particular condition. This article investigates empathetic modes of knowing among families marked by illness, drawing on 52 h of video recordings of support group sessions for children of parents with mental illness in Denmark and interviews with 11 participating children. Inspired by the sociology of empathy, the analysis shows that empathetic knowledge involves knowing illness from the outside (through observations of the ill person's body) and from the inside (through the affective impressions left on the next of kin's own body). This empathetic knowledge is relational, bodily and affective, and, together with other ways of knowing, it shapes everyday lives and projects imagined futures. The article demonstrates that the concept of empathetic knowledge can advance our sociological understandings of next of kin.