Health Sociology Review最新文献

Women in the Netherlands with non-western migration backgrounds experience domestic violence at the intersection of culture and gender, and visit their general practitioners (GPs) with health concerns related to the violence. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with GPs, this paper illuminates how GPs navigate the process of decision-making around intervention in domestic violence, with particular attention to the role of autonomy. Patient autonomy is a core principle in Dutch general practice. The term refers to the principle that GPs must respect that competent adults can make autonomous decisions about the care they do and do not want, and that GPs must respect patients' views, choices, and ways of life. The interview data shows great variation in how GPs respond in situations of domestic violence against women with non-western migration backgrounds. Deploying 'somatechnics of perception', this paper explores how GPs' perceptions of their patients' autonomy are both the agent and effect of a complex and embodied negotiation of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, medical ethics, and morality. In highlighting how these patients' autonomy is rendered (un)intelligible and (il)legible in contextually specific ways, this paper sheds light on how GPs in the Netherlands can better assist women with non-western migration backgrounds who experience domestic violence.

Women and girls with disabilities are located at the intersections of patriarchal, ableist, and other structures of oppression that produce specific and heightened vulnerabilities to gender-based violence (GBV). Public health practitioners widely recognise the role of the healthcare sector in addressing GBV, however the role of the healthcare sector in addressing GBV must be questioned given ongoing barriers to healthcare access for people with disabilities. Grounded in an intersectional framework, I conducted a summative content analysis of GBV healthcare interventions to examine whether and how disability and intersectionality are mobilised in public health understanding of, and strategies to, address GBV. By bringing visibility to the ways in which silences construct and sustain the invisibility of women with disabilities and other social structures, I argue that GBV healthcare responses not only fail to provide care for women with disabilities across social locations, but they also risk reproducing understandings that devalue their lives.

Globally, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been recognised as a serious health issue not only because of the immediate impacts at the time the injury occurs but even more so due to the longstanding impacts. Even though TBI is a globally recognised condition, the research is disproportionately focused on its incidence in, and immediate and long-term effects on men. A growing body of research suggests that generally, women who experience family violence are at high risk of TBI and suffer its impacts in ways that reflect gendered differences in the patterns and frequency of violence. In Australia, the social and physical costs of TBI are multiplied for Indigenous women, whose experience of disability and access to healthcare lies at the intersection of gender and race in the historical context of settler colonialism. The present study addresses the need for research into the sociodemographic inequalities that affect access to culturally appropriate hospital care, timely response systems, and flexible, safe and engaged social services. This paper draws on data from interviews and focus groups with Indigenous women, hospital staff and community-based service providers and suggests potential pathways for further research in settler-colonial settings elsewhere in the world.

This paper uses a drama-based method to illustrate the responses of healthcare and legal systems to women experiencing coercive control. This approach involved writing a play using the first-person narrative voice of a victim-survivor. We presented the play at the Stop Domestic Violence Conference (Gold Coast, Australia) in 2021. The central character, 'Kate', provided an embodied performance that enabled the conference participants to see, feel and understand experiences of coercive control from a personal perspective. We followed the trajectory of coercive control from the beginning of an intimate relationship to the time of separation. We showed how the process of coercive control escalates from love bombing, reproductive coercion, isolation, and technology-facilitated abuse until a point of police intervention. As Kate told her story, the conference audience witnessed the barriers and challenges faced by survivors of coercive control, and the emotional, financial, and psychological impacts that are intensified in geographically remote environments. They watched Kate navigate health and other systems meant to help women experiencing domestic and family violence, but that ultimately failed to deliver. Finally, the drama-based approach allowed us to present a feminist embodiment of coercive control and an innovative method for communicating inter-disciplinary research findings on domestic abuse.

As trauma survivors, women and girls from refugee backgrounds face significant challenges when settling in host countries; the risk of domestic and family violence (DFV) accentuates these difficulties. Reflecting on findings from a seven-year university and industry research partnership, this article explores the etiology of DFV in women from refugee backgrounds living in non-metropolitan Australia. Drawing on action research principles and intersectional and social ecological theoretical frameworks, this study captured diverse women's views about experiences and strategies for addressing DFV in refugee communities. Having developed trusting relationships with participants over the different study phases, the first author conducted in-depth interviews with women of refugee backgrounds, listening deeply and confirming findings with participants as they emerged. Interviews were also conducted with staff from settlement, health and specialist domestic violence services to offer a broad perspective on how best to support refugee women experiencing DFV. Key findings revealed stressors and support that impact violence, such as employment status and acculturation, and identification of who the women would trust if experiencing violence. By understanding the interweaving factors influencing women's risk of DFV and strategies to address it, global healthcare providers will be better positioned to collaborate with refugee communities and specialist services.

Like other parts of the world, women and girls in the Commonwealth Caribbean (CC) experience high and escalating rates of physical and sexual violence. The interview presented outlines some factors that underscore the gendered disparities of violence against women in the Caribbean as well as how healthcare responses are not developed for marginalised women and girls. The interview explores the invisibility of women and girls within healthcare and broader national healthcare structures responses through case details analysis of a Barbadian strategic litigation case. The interview calls for transdisciplinary approaches to analysing the effectiveness of the global health system that make space for not just traditional research approaches but also lived experiences 'from below' and input of advocates and activists. Despite Barbados being a signatory to a range of global health initiatives to improve healthcare responses to gender-based violence, the country does not have a formalised, comprehensive national plan to inform prevention and intervention measures. The interview shows the connections between plantocratic patriarchal culture (PPC) and the existing gaps that cause harm to women and girls who experience various types of gendered violence.

This paper examines the conflicting temporal orders of the regional nurse, a role which has been introduced to deal with the increasing demands of aged care and workforce shortages in regional settings. We build on ethnographic research in the Netherlands, in which we examine regional district nurses as a new professional role that attends to (sub)acute care needs, connecting and coordinating different places of care during out of office hours. We use the concept of 'temporal regional order' to reflect on the different ways caring practices are temporally structured by management and care practitioners, in close interaction with patients and informal care givers. In the results three types of disruptions of the regional temporal order are distinguished: interfering bodily rhythms and needs; (un)expected workings of technologies; and disrupting acts of patient and relatives. It was region nurses' prime responsibility to stabilise these interferences and prevent or soften a disruption of the regional order. In accomplishing this, we show how nurses craft their professional role in between various care settings, without getting involved too much in patient care, to be mobile as 'temporal caregivers'.

This paper considers matters of time in online mental health peer support. Significant evidence of the value of peer support exists, with new digital platforms emerging as part of the digitisation of mental health support. This paper draws from a project exploring the impact of digital platforms on peer support through interviews with users of a major UK-based online peer support platform. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'living present', the paper highlights how notions of past, present and future operate as co-existing dimensions of the present. The analysis highlights how the immediacy of digital platforms elicits expectations of peer support being 'on tap', which creates challenges when support is not received synchronously. Unlike in-person support, digital platforms facilitate the archiving of support, which can (re)enter the present at any moment through asynchronous communication. Anticipations of the future feature as dimensions of the present in terms of feelings regarding when support may no longer be needed. The paper offers potential implications for social scientific understanding of digital peer support, which include valuable insight for mental health services designing and delivering digital peer support.

Hauntology has become an increasingly alluring concept in social sciences to reflect upon everyday life and how subjects dwell upon scenarios pervaded not only by the potency of the actual but also the haunting of the past and the virtual. Drawing on the concept of 'hauntology', we inquire about recurring temporalities and spectrality themes concerning the 'controversial' diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Chile. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews with health practitioners, teachers, school staff, diagnosed children, and their peers from 3-year-long research, we examine how the performance of the diagnosis by clinicians at times can produce a modification of the temporality of the diagnosed children from that moment forth. Amidst tension created by educational policies, ideas of well-being, pedagogical practices, and everyday living, the diagnosis keeps repeating its agentic capacity while resisting its decay, becoming ever-present and actual. Once cast, the diagnosis acts as a repeating force that can shape every experience, cancelling the possibility for the child to become different by unfolding out of the diagnosis.

Australia has made considerable progress towards the public-health 'elimination' of the hepatitis C virus. Nonetheless, reinfection remains a key challenge, with little understanding regarding the lived complexities of post-cure life among people who inject drugs. Our analysis examines reinfection through the lens of 'time', a largely overlooked and under-utilised analytical concept within the field of hepatitis C. Drawing on qualitative data from a study examining treatment outcomes and reinfection, our analysis concentrates on three participant accounts or 'cases'. Working within a new materialist framework, we combine recent social science scholarship which, firstly, posits cure as a socio-material 'gathering', and secondly, proposes a 'futurology' of hepatitis C and its treatment. We found participant accounts troubled the neat binary of pre- and post-treatment life, instead detailing the challenges of remaining virologically safe while navigating complex, local life-worlds. Rather than a singular, post-treatment future instantiated by cure, participants described the fluid, emergent nature of what we might describe as 'lived' or 'embodied' time, including multiplicities of becoming in a perpetual present. We conclude that our understanding of reinfection needs to move beyond its current, narrow biomedical conception and organising temporal logic to honour and incorporate complexity in practice.