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This paper explores social scientists' and humanities (SSH) scholars' integration within the academic medical research environment. Three questions guided our investigation: Do SSH scholars adapt to the medical research environment? How do they navigate their career within a culture that may be inconsistent with their own? What strategies do they use to gain legitimacy? The study builds on three concepts: decoupling, doxa, and epistemic habitus. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with SSH scholars working in 11 faculties of medicine across Canada. Participants were selected through purposeful and snowball sampling. The data were analyzed by thematic content analysis. For most of our participants, moving into medicine has been a challenging experience, as their research practices and views of academic excellence collided with those of medicine. In order to achieve some level of legitimacy more than half of our participants altered their research practices. This resulted in a dissonance between their internalized appreciation of academic excellence and their new, altered, research practices. Only six participants experienced no form of challenge or dissonance after moving into medicine, while three decided to break with their social science and humanities past and make the medical research community their new home. We conclude that the work environment for SSH scholars in faculties of medicine does not deliver on the promise of inclusiveness made by calls for interdisciplinarity in Canadian health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last three decades, mothers of children who have chronic illnesses or disabilities have been studied extensively. With some notable exceptions, most research has overlooked the socio-political context of disability and has interpreted maternal behaviours and feelings in negative or psychopathological terms. In this paper we report the results of using Pierre Bourdieu''s central concepts to reanalyse three independent qualitative studies focused on mothers’ accounts of raising children with severe disabling conditions. We illustrate the logic of mothers’ practices and conclude that they represent strategic manipulations of accessible bodily, cultural and symbolic capital consistent with the ‘rules of the game’ across multiple fields. Mothers struggled to establish and maintain the personhood and value of their children, and to obtain resources within a broader context of body normativeness, exclusion and inequity. This Bourdieusian rendering of the logic of maternal practices has important implications for research and paediatric practices. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]