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This introduction to a special section brings together three papers first presented at a panel, 'Medical Professions in South Asia: Historical and Contemporary Analyses', at the 26th European Conference on South Asian Studies, held in Vienna, Austria and online, in July 2021. All three papers deal with aspects of the professionalisation of biomedical doctors in India since its independence in 1947. The authors bring together historical and sociological approaches to illuminate the growth of specialisms, patterns of practitioner–patient interactions and efforts to maintain occupational closure and maintain status in the face of growing challenges. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these papers for the sociology of health and illness in India and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Bruno Latour being a prolific writer and commentator. Topics include creating the accessibility of services for patients facing alcohol or drug addiction or malarial rash or an infarction; and discussing the concept of ‘actor-network-theory' in the work on intersectoral action on local neighbourhood.

Health inequalities impact sex‐variant people in highly differentiated ways. This is evidenced in much academic and activist intersex research documenting the highly specific forms of inequalities arising from misrecognition, discrimination and human rights abuses inherent to pathologised accounts of non‐normative bodies. Important theoretical work further interrogates the implications of sex variant subjectivities, identities and bodies for static or binary notions of both sex and gender. In this paper, we aim to contribute further to this scholarship. We draw upon feminist materialist and Deleuzean‐informed understandings of materials or matter to rethink debates over sex‐variant subjectivities, identities and bodies in relation to inequalities in health. We argue 'the turn to matter' and associated new materialist theories draw attention to the complex, dynamic relational assemblages and entanglements mutually constituting the affective, embodied and socio‐material worlds of intersex people. Informed by these theories, we propose that inequalities can be more fully addressed through a new health equity research agenda that is co‐produced with sex‐variant people. This agenda will enable a fuller exploration of the unsettling but transformative capacities of intersex matters and meanings with the contextually specific understandings of equity in relation to health and health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Niklas Luhmann's vision of the modern functionally differentiated society, health presents one of the essential function systems, along with politics, law, economy and science. While he devoted much effort to elaborating the theoretical foundations of the latter function systems, his work on the health system was relatively sparse. This research gap has been rendered particularly acute by the recent COVID‐19 crisis. In reconstructing and updating the Luhmannian analysis of this system, this article presents a three‐dimensional concept of organic, psychic and social health and highlights the risks raised by a potential overexpansion of the health concept to the planetary level. The most important of these risks is shown to be the potential rise of totalitarian social control that exceeds classical forms of medical social control. The proposed argument not only contributes to the public criticism of the political responses to the COVID‐19 crisis but also fills in some missing pieces of Luhmann's seminal elaboration of the health system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore how women in different social classes had differential access to resources and services to enhance their 'wellness'—resulting in classed roles in alcohol consumption. We analyse data from a qualitative study on alcohol by midlife women in South Australia and employ the analogy of a 'toolkit' in order to understand the structural patterning of 'wellness tools'. Bourdieu's relational model of class guides our exploration of women's inequitable opportunities for wellness. Higher social class women had 'choices' facilitated by bulging wellness toolkits, such as yoga, exercise and healthy eating regimens—alcohol consumption was not essential to promoting 'wellness' and did not have an important place in their toolkits. Middle‐class women had less well‐stocked toolkits and consumed alcohol in a 'compensation approach' with other wellness tools. Alcohol consumption received positive recognition and was a legitimised form of enjoyment, fun and socialising, which needed counterbalancing with healthy activities. Working‐class women had sparse toolkits—other than alcohol—which was a tool for dealing with life's difficulties. Their focus was less on 'promoting wellness' and more on 'managing challenging circumstances'. Our social class‐based analysis is nestled within the sociology of consumption and sociological critiques of the wellness industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the infrastructures of racial violence, health and debility in European society that were instigated by colonialism and its interwoven violations, as well as the need for connected sociologies of health and illness for the common good. Other topics include the normative order that maintains the marginationalisation of minority and people of color scholars, and the ethnographic studies of debility by anthropologist Julie Livingston.