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This paper is concered with how the application of narrative analysis and participatory policy analysis can broaden our understanding of social movement activism in the field of health. Drawing on comparative case studies of citizen contestation in the health field in Canada and the United States, I examine how health social movement actors have sought to influence policy and discourse in the health field using, in part, their "situated knowledge" of living with a disease. Three case studies are being explored: (1) multiple chemical sensitivity; (2) asthma; (3) autism. While cross-national studies in comparative health policy have taught us much about the shape of the health care system (public or private), the role of institutions in shaping policy outcomes, and the influence of elite interests such as physicians, these approaches have paid less attention to the role of non-state actors, other than elites. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with social movement activists in a number of Canadian and American cities, I am interested in how the boundaries demarcating experts from non experts are increasingly being disrupted, as patients acquire and exchange information, and contest, perhaps unwittingly, medical and scientific authority. An approach centered on eliciting the narratives constructed by health social movements allows us to explore how such actors advance their own expert knowledges in the face of biomedicine. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a few months in 2002 Cuban biotechnology received considerable international attention. That year, John Bolton, then the Undersecretary of State for Nonproliferation, claimed that “the United States believes that Cuba had at least a limited offensive ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]