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This article uses ethnographic research to reflect upon how the treatment of 'everyday' illnesses in Niger engages concepts of social identity. Inspired by Bourdieu's concept of social distinction, as well as Appadurai's edited volume on the 'social lives' of 'things', I present an analysis of how medications are understood by their users in terms of social and ideological meaning in one rural Hausa village. Decisions about medication choice were framed by three main themes: belonging to the 'modern' world, 'traditional' Hausa culture, and religious identity. This article does not argue that these notions of identity fully explain medication use, nor necessarily predict treatment choices. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the dynamic meanings given to treatment decisions after they have been made, attributed to the medications themselves and negotiated through their circulation in a context where multiple medical systems are drawn from to manage illness. Producers and sellers of medication also engage these meaning-centred concepts, which have theoretical and practical interest for the social sciences and public health. A virtual abstract for this paper can be viewed at: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data collected through semi‐structured interviews and focus group discussions with 37 adult men living in Brunei Darussalam, this paper explores how masculinities and expectations about male roles across the life course influence men's perceptions, of and attitudes towards health and health help‐seeking behaviour. Bruneian men gave accounts that consistently spoke of a series of masculine roles and associated attributes and behaviours, which mapped across the life course. Men described health and the steps that they had taken to protect their health in terms of responsibilities associated with being a breadwinner, provider of support for parents, role model and leader of the family. Whilst adherence to Bruneian norms about masculinity could obstruct men's engagement with health help‐seeking, we also found that men mobilised their understanding of Bruneian masculinity such that it provided culturally legitimate way of engaging in health help‐seeking. We conclude by considering implications for further development of conceptualisations of masculinities, particularly responding to the call to consider Connell's theory of 'hegemonic masculinity' in the context of the Global South. We also consider the implications of the findings of this research for policy and practice in provision of health promotion and services in Brunei. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicalisation has been an important concept in sociological discussions of medicine since its adoption by medical sociologists in the early 1970s. Yet it has been criticised by some sociologists, in part because it seems too negative about medicine, and modified or replaced by others with concepts deemed more relevant like biomedicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation. My aim in this paper is to reassess the concept and consider whether it still has value in exploring significant aspects of the role of medicine in present-day society. I start with an archaeology of the concept's development and the different ways it has been used. This covers some familiar ground but is essential to the main task: examining criticisms of the concept and assessing its value. I conclude that the concept continues to have a crucial and productive place in sociological analyses of medicine and that the process of medicalisation is still a key feature of late-modern social life and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within western cultures, portrayals of dementia as 'a living death' are being challenged by people living with the diagnosis. Yet dementia remains one of the most feared conditions. The sociological lens of citizenship provides a conceptual framework for reviewing the role of society and culture in repositioning dementia away from deficit to a discourse of agency and interdependence. Awareness of cognitive change, and engaging with the diagnostic process, moves people into a transitional, or 'liminal' state of uncertainty. They are no longer able to return to their previous status, but may resist the unwanted status of 'person with dementia'. Drawing on qualitative studies on social participation by people with dementia, we suggest that whether people are able to move beyond the liminal phase depends on acceptance of the diagnosis, social capital, personal and cultural beliefs, the responses of others and comorbidities. Some people publicly embrace a new identity whereas others withdraw, or are withdrawn, from society to live in the shadow of the fourth age. We suggest narratives of deficit fail to reflect the agency people with dementia can enact to shape their social worlds in ways which enable them to establish post-liminal citizen roles. (A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be viewed at: ) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health research concerning Indigenous peoples has been strongly characterised by deficit discourse—a 'mode of thinking' that is overly focused on risk behaviours and problems. Strengths‐based approaches offer a different perspective by promoting a set of values that recognise the capacities and capabilities of Indigenous peoples. In this article, we seek to understand the conceptual basis of strengths‐based approaches as currently presented in health research. We propose that three main approaches exist: 'resilience' approaches concerned with the personal skills of individuals; 'social–ecological' approaches, which focus on the individual, community and structural aspects of a person's environment; and 'sociocultural' approaches, which view 'strengths' as social relations, collective identities and practices. We suggest that neither 'resilience' nor 'social–ecological' approaches sufficiently problematise deficit discourse because they remain largely informed by Western concepts of individualised rationality and, as a result, rest on logics that support notions of absence and deficit. In contrast, sociocultural approaches tend to view 'strengths' not as qualities possessed by individuals, but as the structure and character of social relations, collective practices and identities. As such, they are better able to capture Indigenous ways of knowing and being and provide a stronger basis on which to build meaningful interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a critical reflexive process (An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 1992; Theory, Culture & Society, 13, 1996, 17), this article identifies and examines issues of power, complicity and knowledge production as they emerged in the first author's master's research on migrant women farmers' economic and reproductive health experiences in the middle belt of Ghana. We examine the ambivalent positionality of the international graduate student researcher as "other of the other" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30, 2005, 2017, p. 2025), and how diverse fields of power, including the researcher's educational institution and cultural norms regarding gender relations, mediated interactions among various actors in the research process. Specifically, we examine how the student researcher was complicit in reinforcing patriarchal standards, perpetuating western saviourism and committing symbolic violence. Situating these reflexive findings in relation to insights from feminist postcolonial theories, we highlight how power relations, gender and social class informed these ambivalent complicities. Rather than erase/silence these tensions in the research process, we argue that such ambivalences may be an inevitable dimension of transnational knowledge creation, and thus, it is imperative that researchers consider how their ambivalent positionalities and complicities may be navigated and leveraged most productively and with the least harm to research participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article features data drawn from interviews with doctors working in the Finnish occupational health‐care system. These are used to explore the value of an Eliasian approach towards interpreting and assessing the moral meanings and social dynamics of relationships between health practitioners and their patients. We attend to spiralling 'formalizing' and 'informalizing' processes and how these are operating to reconfigure doctor–patient relationships. We document some of the ways in which Finnish doctors are adapting to these processes. While data drawn from a British context suggest both doctor and patients are inclined to adopt positions of mutual distrust and hostility, by contrast we note that in this Finnish setting more concerted attempts are being made to renegotiate social roles, cultural meanings and individual responsibilities. We propose that this can be taken as an instance where informalization is accompanied by revitalized currents of formalization and new syntheses of moral codes and conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways that fertility clinics in the Czech Republic and Spain attract international fertility clients for fertility treatment involving egg donation. I draw upon a content analysis of 18 fertility clinics' advertising materials and 31 in‐depth interviews with fertility professionals in the Czech Republic and Spain, and Canadian fertility travellers to show how clinics use cultural health capital (CHC) to persist as popular destination sites for fertility travellers. I argue that the use of evidence‐based medicine and patient‐centred care combined with bioracial discourses are strategies by which clinics create a culture of fertility care that is legible to white, middle‐class, hetero travellers. My interviews with fertility patients who travelled to these sites show the ways in which CHC is interactional—I document how fertility travellers desire these specific practices that are both created for and marketed to them. By expanding the definition of CHC to show how fertility clinics market and fertility travellers expect a particular culture of fertility medicine, I elucidate the interactions between clinics and professionals that reinforce ideals of white motherhood and the stratification of reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses how suppression or lack of appreciation of the knowledge of minority ethnic people or people of color about dementia can have adverse consequences and how to address the issue. Topics include the ways in which researchers conceptualise dementia based on ethnicity, and the important contributions of Doctor Solomon Carter Fuller to the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease as one of the reasons why suppression of ethnic knowledge should be avoided.

In the present study, we examine socio‐cultural and practical aspects of human papillomavirus vaccination (HPVV) through a multi‐sited study of framings. We ask how HPVV is framed in the daily lives of vaccination‐aged Finnish girls and in school nurses' everyday work. We then mirror these framings against both each other and Finland's official vaccination campaign. Based on analysis of interviews with 24 nurses and 12 girls and the campaign materials, we argue first that the campaign frames vaccination as an individual, knowledge‐based decision reflecting the informed consent principle. Second, however, the vaccination is framed in the everyday lives of eligible girls through gendered social ties and as a gendered and cohort‐specific event pivoting around the needle prick. Third, HPVV is not primarily framed in the school nurses' work as preparing the girls for the vaccination decision by sharing official information but through trust‐based social relationships with the girls and their parents. We conclude that, as the vaccination is not an issue of individually reflected and knowledge‐based decision‐making for the two interviewed key groups, the official Finnish HPVV campaign and the undergirding informed consent principle drift into problems in their practical implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nurses and nurse's aides at geriatric facilities face demanding patients and challenging situations that trigger undesired emotions. The psychological implications of care workers' emotional labour have been extensively researched, but not so their emotional experiences and the regulation of these emotions aimed at normalizing the extraordinary situations that arise in the course of geriatric care. The present study is based on data collected in interviews with 36 nurses and nurse's aides, and nine health professionals and management‐level employees, on participant observations, and on field notes collected over a period of 14 months at two geriatric institutions in Israel. The data reveal the construction of patience and impatience as the pivotal emotional experience that needs regulation to cope successfully with extraordinary situations. The findings suggest that strict patience‐display rules were constructed as an occupational impetus that exacts a price by increasing emotional load. Patience was regulated continually by normalizing practices that were culturally embedded in the organizations, by reframing patients' abusive behaviours, and by diffusing undesired emotions using detachment and disengagement practices. The findings contribute to the scarce empirical research on emotional labour of nurse's aides, and to the conceptualization and empirical study of nurses' normalizing regulation practices as cultural‐organizational artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In challenging the 'validity' of the body mass index (BMI), the construct of metabolic syndrome has been used to comprehend how obesity affects Japanese people. This article is grounded in an adaptation of the 'sexual scripting theory' (Gagnon and Simon, 2005) and proposes the concept of 'ethno‐essentialisms of the self' to explore the cultural scripts underpinning the development of metabolic syndrome. Ethno‐essentialisms of the self indicate a dialectical relationship between a Japanese healthy self and a non‐Japanese unhealthy Other, where ethno‐racial susceptibilities might make a Japanese self prone to develop metabolic‐related diseases. Despite these susceptibilities, Japanese 'biopedagogy' (Wright, 2009) to control bodyweight is oriented by a proper daily calculation of food consumption in relation to calorie‐burning. Biopedagogy in the form of food and nutrition education has largely translated into unyielding efforts to (re)traditionalise eating habits to prevent the supposed Westernisation of Japanese food. Overall, medical knowledge serves to propagate ethno‐essentialisms of the self, whose unintended consequence could be 'clinical iatrogenic disease' (Illich, 1976). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disembarking from a traditional approach of narrow hazardous environmental and structural conditions in understanding urban slums' health problems and moving towards a new notion of what constitutes health for slum dwellers will open a new avenue to recognise whether and how health is being prioritised in disadvantaged settings. Drawing on in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with a total of 67 men and 68 women from Kolkata slums and 62 men and 48 women from Bangalore slums, this study explored how knowledge, social realities, material and symbolic drivers of a place interweave in shaping slum‐dwellers' patterned way of understanding health, and the ways health and illnesses are managed. The current study adds to the growing evidence that ordinary members of the urban slums can articulate critical linkages between their everyday sociocultural realities and health conditions, which can support the design and delivery of interventions to promote wellbeing. The concept of health is not confined to an abstract idea but manifested in slum‐dwellers' sporadic practices of preventive and curative care as well as everyday living arrangements, where a complex arrangement of physical, psychological, financial, sociocultural and environmental dimensions condition their body and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constituting 'social problems' in particular ways has a range of effects, including for how subjects are positioned within policy and discourse. Employing an approach grounded in poststructuralist and social constructionist thinking, this analysis interrogates how the subjects of mental health care were constituted and problematised in mental health policies in two distinctive contexts, unsettling the taken‐for granted assumptions which underpin these problematisations. Two policies were selected for analysis as exemplar pieces of mental health policy reform in Hong Kong and New South Wales (NSW). Subjects were constituted as 'patientised' individuals (in Hong Kong) encouraged to depend on professionals who help them reintegrate into the 'normal' community, and as 'traumatised' individuals (in NSW) expected to take responsibility to guide the delivery of mental health care and respected as a part of diversity in community settings. While both policies constituted subjects as 'unwell individuals' and enacted 'dividing practices', subjectivities were shaped by distinctive cultural and socio‐political contexts. This analysis shifts our attention away from a focus on the effectiveness of policy solutions to the heterogeneity and contingency of policy 'problems' and 'subjects', opening up new possibilities for 'out‐of‐the‐box' policy responses to mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Adopting Kleinman's and Lock's ideas that there are cultural variations in understandings of health care and the medicalisation of ageing bodies, this study compares and contrasts older adults’ use of anti‐ageing medicine in two cultural settings. Based on 42 interviews conducted in Australia and Japan with adults aged 60 and over, findings revealed distinct pathways to initiating anti‐ageing medicine use between the two cohorts which reflect different attitudes to the medicalisation of ageing in the two settings. In Australia where consultation of medical doctors for major and minor ailments is routine for many older adults, supplement use was initiated on doctor's advice, or reactionary, in that dissatisfaction with doctors’ advice was the impetus. By contrast, many Japanese elders did not seek the advice of medical practitioners for minor health issues, considering them instead to be part of a natural process of ageing, and viewed their supplement use as co‐extensive with their use of Shokuji‐ryohou or a traditional corrective diet. Despite these cultural differences, both the Australian and Japanese elders resisted more extreme manifestations of the biomedicalisation of ageing and took anti‐ageing medicine to ward off the perceived danger of surgery in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at a major metropolitan art museum and botanic garden, this article considers the practical accomplishment of American museums’ ‘health turn’ by tracing how museum staff develop therapeutic programmes for visitors with disabilities. In doing so, it considers one of medical sociology's fundamental theoretical questions – how ideologies of health order social life – in an unconventional empirical setting. Acknowledging contemporary arguments for both the relative merits and unintended consequences of this policy trend, I focus instead on the particular institutional arrangements, professional norms, and material cultures of art and nature that shape museums’ therapeutic work, so as to reveal its effects. Data reveals ideological similarities, but practical differences, between museological and medical understandings of wellness. Extending a ‘medical sociology of practice’ to new contexts ultimately foregrounds the contingencies, and diversity, of therapeutic mechanisms and meanings, thereby broadening sociological research on healing and healthism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the social rationales underlying the consumption or rejection of medication for memory by the elderly. Our analysis is set within the wider frame of the current use of psychopharmaceuticals for the enhancement of everyday performance, discussing its relationship to new cultures of ageing. Our results, from a recently concluded study, point to different patterns of investment in memory in old age. On the one hand, we found a willingness to consume medication for memory - a heterogeneous disposition split between the imaginary of disease and that of performance enhancement. On the other hand, we found a cultural resistance and scepticism towards the use of psychopharmaceuticals for performance purposes. This suggests that a new frame of psychopharmaceuticalization of old age - represented by memory medication - is prompting different rationales, ranging from consumption to resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we utilise qualitative research techniques to explore how 14 urban American Indian ( AI) females (aged 11-17) living in the state of Maryland discursively construct and experience health and the body, as well as how/if traditional culture shapes their understandings. In doing so, we address a significant gap in the knowledge base concerning the health beliefs of urban AI youth, and build upon research utilising a decolonising approach. Using a two-step process of thematic analysis and poststructuralist discourse analysis, we arrived at three key findings: (1) while youths are taught (and learn) mainstream lessons about health and bodily norms (mostly at school), they negotiate these lessons in complex and at times contradictory ways; (2) they do not view their AI status as conferring more or less risk upon them or their community; and (3) AI identity appears to be fluid in nature, becoming more salient, even a resource, in certain situations. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of spaces within the urban context in shaping youths' embodied subjectivities, and in particular, contrast the space of the school with that of the urban AI community centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]