Search

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including relationships between power, space and dominant discourses; importance of structural dimensions of power between professionals and patients; and role of environment in healthcare services.

In this paper we, twin sisters, present a joint autoethnographic account of providing end of life care for our mum who had terminal cancer. Using the theoretical framing of performance from Goffman's theory of Dramaturgy, we present the findings from a joint autoethnography, focusing on two key themes: performing emotion work and performing what we conceptualise as 'dignity work'. This paper's contributions are twofold. First, conceptually, this paper offers an important contribution to literature concerned with the sociology of illness, by critically engaging with Goffman's notion of frontstage and backstage performance, applied to the context of home care provided by family carers. The second contribution of this paper is methodological; we promote the under‐utilised approach of a joint autoethnography and argue for its usefulness in the context of end of life care. We contend that the process of writing this paper was emotionally challenging, yet arriving at the final paper, which serves as a legacy of our mum, was cathartic. We argue for the usefulness of written diaries as a backstage arena through which other informal carers can think through, and come to terms with, experiences of death and dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses the various topics within the issue, including ethnic minority experiences in healthcare, sexual and reproductive health, and end-of-life care.

This article offers an overview of an Indigenous‐led participatory research project, The Future We Dream, co‐developed by rural land defenders in Central America and the Caribbean. To engage in recent dialectics concerning complicity and decolonising methodologies, we centre Indigenous Maya conceptions of health, wellbeing and what 'living well' means to community members. For context, The Future We Dream responds to the 2015 landmark ruling made by the Caribbean Court of Justice affirming the land rights of the Maya people of Southern Belize. Amidst tensions with the state that followed the ruling, an autonomous movement composed of grassroots organisers turned their attention towards imagining and constructing a self‐determined future. In turn, the communities initiated a research exercise inspired by desire‐based methodologies (Tuck, 2009) to articulate a collective vision of a healthful Maya future outside of colonial‐liberal worldviews, and notably, formulating Maya visions of healthful, sustainable worlds. In reporting on this one example of grassroots, anticolonial health research that departs from the hierarchal knowledge production practices of liberal academia, this paper details the collaborative process/project; the complexities/complicities of research involving Indigenous communities; and how Indigenous epistemologies are generative vis‐a‐vis unsettling conventional knowledge production practices in the contentious field of global health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently dominant in medical discourse, the concept of self‐management sees the responsibility for health and illness shift from the state to the individual. However, while this emphasis on individual responsibility and management has burgeoned, the role and status of partners and other family members in the management of chronic illness remains under‐theorised. While self‐management privileges individual responsibility for the management of chronic illness, the role of partners remains unclear. This paper utilises data from a study of heterosexual couples' experiences of living with the chronic gynaecological condition endometriosis to explore how male partners engage in its day‐to‐day management. In all, 22 couples participated in in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with each partner interviewed separately (n = 44). Data were analysed thematically and dyadically, informed by an interpretivist relational approach. The paper utilises the concept of healthwork to describe the illness work, everyday life work, biographical work and emotion work men engaged in. The paper demonstrates how the conceptual value of healthwork is enhanced by incorporating an analysis of the emotional effort required in managing chronic illness. The paper illustrates the value of investigating the role of partners in managing chronic illness to provide a fuller account of the distributed and relational nature of healthwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, increases in medical technologies in the critical care setting have advanced the practice of medicine, enabling patients to live longer while also creating dilemmas for end‐of‐life decision‐making. Clinicians have increasingly been called on to involve patients and family members in decision‐making through a process of shared decision‐making (SDM), yet less is known about how SDM plays out in the critical care setting and the ways in which clinicians engage in SDM. Using observational data from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two intensive care units and interviews with 33 family members of 25 critically ill patients and 51 clinicians, I explore how clinicians refer to the choices available in medical decision‐making paradoxically as a 'buffet' of choice while they simultaneously recognise that such rhetoric is misaligned with complex and emotional decision‐making, often involving pain and suffering. Lastly, this paper considers the role of SDM and the ways in which clinicians push back on the 'buffet' rhetoric and engage in practices to guide families in end‐of‐life decision‐making by granting permission for families to make decisions and validating their decisions to decline treatment when there is an opportunity for more treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of disruptions to the organisation and delivery of healthcare services and efforts to re‐order care through emotion management during the COVID‐19 pandemic in the UK. Framing care as an affective practice, studying healthcare workers' (HCWs) experiences enables better understanding of how interactions between staff, patients and families changed as a result of the pandemic. Using a rapid qualitative research methodology, we conducted interviews with frontline HCWs in two London hospitals during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic and sourced public accounts of HCWs' experiences of the pandemic from social media (YouTube and Twitter). We conducted framework analysis to identify key factors disrupting caring interactions. Fear of infection and the barriers of physical distancing acted to separate staff from patients and families, requiring new affective practices to repair connections. Witnessing suffering was distressing for staff, and providing a 'good death' for patients and communicating care to families was harder. In addition to caring for patients and families, HCWs cared for each other. Infection control measures were important for limiting the spread of COVID‐19 but disrupted connections that were integral to care, generating new work to re‐order interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its point of departure Bury's (1982) concept of chronic illness as biographical disruption, this paper provides a critical assessment of its fortunes since that time. Having 'rescued' the concept from recent postmodern and disability critiques, the paper provides a series of further reflections on its strengths and weaknesses, including the notion of 'normal illness'; the importance of timing and context; the significance of continuity as well as loss; and the role of biographical disruption itself in the aetiology of illness. This, in turn, provides the basis for a broader set of reflections on the vicissitudes of the biographically embodied self in conditions of late modernity: a situation of chronic reflexivity in which our bodies/selves are continually problematised if not pathologised. The paper concludes, given this 'balance sheet', with a discussion of some potentially fruitful lines of future research, including links with the life-events and inequalities literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MERIDIAN study examined whether in‐utero MRI (iuMRI) improves the accuracy of diagnosis of foetal brain abnormalities, when used as an adjunct to ultrasound anomaly scanning. A diagnostic iuMRI differs from routine ultrasound screening because of its infrequent use and scanning procedure. Nested within this trial, this sociological study explored the acceptability of iuMRI as a technology and its contribution to parental decision‐making. Our sociological interpretation of the role of iuMR images in prenatal diagnosis draws on narrative interviews with women (and some partners) who underwent MRI imaging at three different centres. Overall, participants found iuMRI helpful in decision‐making because it either confirmed or disconfirmed previous results, or provided additional information. Expectant couples experienced the iuMR imaging process as informative, but also as having emotive and practical value. Our paper extends the existing sociological literature on antenatal testing and visualising the foetus, by using iuMR diagnostic imaging to further explore the concept of the unborn entity. Our data suggest that alongside the iuMR images, the 'parental gaze' and accompanying commentary are used by parents to construct and transform foetal and parental identities despite ongoing uncertainties about, and shifting social contexts to their pregnancy. [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]

This paper explores the nature of agoraphobic sufferers' fears of social spaces drawing on Merleau-Ponty's dual conceptions of 'lived' and 'objective' space. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach highlights both the mediating role of sensations in acquiring a sense of identity and the importance of recognising the social (as opposed to the merely individual) construction of lived space. I argue that an approach capable of theorising agoraphobic 'being-in-the-world' requires just such recognition of the effect that other people have on the space that they occupy. The potential relevance of this approach for sufferers from agoraphobia is explored through a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about intimacy and its rose in relationship risk management. Drawing on qualitative interviews with HIV positive people and their primary sexual partners it becomes apparent that a key tension in relationship risk management is the balance struck between 'relationship safety' and 'viral danger'. We find 'love' and 'intimacy' to be key features of relationship survival, with relationship intimacy and security signalled or strengthened by unprotected sex. Focusing on 'discordant' partnership in particular, we note that relationship risk management is a fragile process characterised by contradiction and anxiety, at once involving risk reduction and risk opportunity. We conclude that the intimate relationship is a prime source of everyday risk management which may be defended, even at potentially high cost, in the time of sexual epidemic. We also note that previous research has painted an overly calculative picture of risk decision-making in which the lived experiences of intimacy and emotions are largely missing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the proposed psychiatric diagnostic category of nonsuicidal self‐injury disorder (NSSID) through the lens of feminist psychiatric disability theory. Mobilising insights from labelling theory's accounts of stigma and recovery, in conjunction with critical and feminist disability theory's attention to emotional and physical pain, we suggest that a feminist psychiatric disability approach to NSSID can illuminate the limits of a fully demedicalised engagement with self‐injury. While remaining critical of psychiatrisation processes, we explore the implications of 'strategic (dis)identifications' with illness labels as mechanisms through which to manage and access care, treatment and recovery. Such a nuanced account engenders more deeply material considerations of pain, stigma, treatment and 'cure' at the site of NSSID, opening new avenues of engagement with self‐injury for sociologists and critical disability scholars alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from an introspective ethnography, this paper proposes a modified theory of awareness among dying patients, their families and medical personnel. By incorporating the sociology of emotions, this modified theory provides a richer understanding of the complexity of relationships in death and dying than the previous literature which focuses on knowledge and the management of knowledge in social interactions in the context of dying. It is suggested that awareness based on know- ledge and the cognitive processing of information not only obscures the emotional content of terminal illness, but also moves to the background the emotional work performed by dying patients and their families. The modified version of awareness theory recognises that emotion and cognition are intertwined and pays close attention to emotions within the social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doubts about the viability of material explanations of social inequalities in health have led to a renewed focus on the aetiological role of psychological stress, and, moreover, on how psychological stress is generated by society's inequality structures. Some researchers maintain that the emerging psycho-social perspective will become the dominant paradigm in research on health inequalities. After commenting on some aetiological topics, the paper outlines how a comprehensive understanding of health inequalities can be constructed from the social stress model, the self-efficacy approach, the sociology of emotions, and the social cohesion approach. The emerging perspective is a striking attempt to deal with health inequalities, as it seems to solve some of the difficulties that other perspectives have had in accounting for existing empirical patterns. Nevertheless, it is perhaps too much to claim that it signifies a paradigm shift. It should rather be considered as an enrichment of the social causation explanation. The latter, when studying health inequalities, should be developed further by considering both material and psycho-social environments, and their mutual interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of personal diaries kept by health‐care staff within a specialist NHS Trust in England during the initial 3 months of the COVID‐19 pandemic. It adopts a moral sensemaking perspective to explore how NHS employees mobilised and reframed ideas of right and wrong in order to make sense of unprecedented uncertainty and displacement. By focussing on how the macro and micro politics of the pandemic were played out in the organisation, the study finds that polarised moral judgements were invoked in order to justify and rationalise a broad array of associated emergent emotions, intuitions, behaviours and practices. This polarisation of moral responses could be seen as a desire to bring order out of chaos and put matters back into place following displacement. This is inevitably an ongoing, complex and variegated enterprise whose results can be as often discomforting as they can be reassuring. Indeed, while moral sensemaking was partly beneficial for staff in that it promoted a greater sense of camaraderie and support for others, it also appeared to have darker consequences in terms of staff wellbeing and the development of more impermeable social boundaries across the organisation through processes of moral 'othering'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have criticised reproductive self‐tracking software applications (apps) for reducing embodied experiences to objective quantifications and leading to user self‐alienation. Building on scholarly work that underscores the sensory and affective dimension of self‐tracking, this ethnographic study explores how users of contraceptive self‐tracking apps come to know their bodies during their everyday tracking practices. By relating tracking data to embodied experiences and relating their experiences back to the data, users produce knowledge of their own lived hormonal physiology. Users learn to articulate how their body feels and acts, foregrounding their body as an instrument of knowing alongside technical devices used. Users also articulate how their body is affected by everyday factors such as personal behaviours, diet, sleep and stress, thereby enacting what I call situated health. By foregrounding people's sensory and affective engagements with their data and their bodies through self‐tracking, this study contributes to understanding how reproductive self‐tracking may be meaningful to users as well as encourages a move beyond the hierarchical opposition between 'objective' numerical data and embodied, lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Encouraging men to open‐up about their feelings is a new cultural directive, yet little is known about how this works in practice, including to promote mental health. Ideals of hegemonic masculinity may be increasingly tolerating expressions of vulnerability in some areas of social life. However, the expression of vulnerability in paid work and/or career situations is regulated by organisational ideals and circumstances that may also produce distress. To address uncertainty in the literature, we investigated the experiences of men in traditionally male dominated professions, namely first responders (police, paramedics, and firefighters/rescue). Twenty‐one UK based men of diverse ranks and experience currently working within first responder services participated in semi‐structured telephone interviews. Distress was positioned as an inevitable part of the work. Yet, striking differences in institutionalised ways of expressing vulnerabilities differentiated the experiences of frontline workers, contributing to a wide spectrum of men's silence right through to relative openness about vulnerability, both in the workplace and domestic spheres. The findings provide importanat insights into how vulnerability is institutionally regulated, illuminating and contrasting how the possibilities for male vulnerabilities are socially produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to recent calls to further incorporate the study of animal health care into the sociology of health and illness. It focuses on a theme with a long tradition in medical sociology, namely clinical communication, but explores matters distinctive to veterinary practice. Drawing on video recordings of 60 consultations across three small animal veterinary clinics in the United Kingdom, we explore how clients and veterinarians (or "vets") fashion fleeting "coalitions of touch," that aptly position the animal to enable the performance of medical work, often in the face of physical resistance. Building on recent developments in the study of haptic sociality, we analyse how care and emotional concern for animal patients is communicated through various forms of embodied action; thus, how the problematics of forced care and restraint are mitigated through distinctive ways of touching and holding animal patients. Moreover, while prior studies of small animal veterinary work have highlighted the significance of talk within the clinician–animal–client triad, we reveal the fundamentally embodied and collaborative work of managing and controlling patients during sometimes intense and fast‐moving episodes of veterinary care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, utilising a narrative approach, aims to describe the experiences of men whose partner had experienced pregnancy loss, based on data from Northern Ireland. The methodology was based upon observation within pregnancy loss self-help groups and in-depth interviews with 14 men who attended the groups. The study also included interviews with 32 midwives and nurses, with the intention of examining attitudes within the medical context towards bereaved fathers. The impact of pregnancy loss on male partners has been largely overlooked in academic research. When a baby dies before birth the loss can be devastating for fathers yet, very often, the world that surrounds them tends to discount their loss, and emotional support and cultural rituals that are normally available to other bereaved individuals are often absent for this group of men. Previous research has shown that men are expected to be emotionally strong in order to support their partner. The present study will show that the perception that men have only a supportive role in pregnancy loss is unjustified, as it ignores the actual life-world experiences of the men, and the meanings they attach to their loss, in what may be a very personal emotional tragedy for them where they have limited support available. The study uncovered several recurring themes including self-blame; loss of identity; and the need to appear strong and hide feelings of grief and anger. There is consideration of the need for hospital staff and the wider community to acknowledge the male partner's grief as being a valid response to the bereavement suffered. [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]

In the United States, Black gay and bisexual men account for a quarter of HIV infections and face intersecting social and structural stigmas along the axes of race, sexuality and class. For those diagnosed with HIV, these inequities shape their lived experiences which include HIV disclosure. Public health has privileged HIV status disclosure as the appropriate moral and responsible choice to protect sex partners, reduce stigma and obtain social support. Though little is known about the emotional aspects of HIV disclosure for Black gay and bisexual men, or how they are shaped by social and structural contexts. Using the frameworks of healthism and emotion work, I explore HIV disclosure among a sample of 30 Black gay and bisexual men living with HIV in the Deep South. Drawing on in‐depth, qualitative interviews, I identify the emotion work that men engaged in to manage their own emotions and protect the emotions of others before, during and after disclosure or nondisclosure. These findings challenge public health research that has explored disclosure as discrete measurable events by illustrating how HIV disclosure is embedded in ongoing social and structural relations and provide insights that can guide new approaches focused on structural inequities that constitute HIV disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on two reception studies. One focuses on an American medical drama which respondents perceived as entertainment but also as a reliable source of information from which they collected medical and social data by using emotional and ludic strategies. The second compares parallel illness narratives in a soap opera and a documentary. Soap operas were described by informants as good pedagogic tools because they attracted large audiences and promoted identification and repetition which enhance learning. On the other hand, they criticised the documentary for being incomplete and artificial. The conclusion argues that viewers are media-literate, astute and insightful. They produce sophisticated, subtle interpretations which cannot be predicted by content analyses of programmes alone. More reception research is therefore needed, particularly since television is increasingly omnipresent and provides a considerable portion of the public's medical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nursing has long been distinguished as an occupation requiring extensive amounts of 'emotion work'. Various studies highlight the importance of a nurse's ability to manage emotion and present the desired demeanour in a number of health care settings. This paper adds to the existing understanding of the emotional elements of nursing work and proposes that Goffman's (1959, 1961, 1967) insights into the 'presentation of self may be a useful approach to recognising a nurse's ability to present many 'faces'. Set against the backdrop of structural changes affecting the British public sector services, and using qualitative data collected from a group of nurses working in a National Health Service trust hospital, it will be shown how nurses are able to juggle the emotional demands made of them whilst still presenting an acceptable face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, self‐tracking technologies have been celebrated for the possibilities they offer to 'optimize' fitness and wellbeing, yet also criticized for being rigid and isolating. In this article, we identify complex tracking arrangements that consist of a variety of data and multiple modalities of tracking emplaced within arrangements of actors and objects (digital/analog tracking devices and data output). We inquire into how these arrangements afford care. Based on our ethnographic research of gym culture in Denmark, we find that individuals make the technologies 'work' for them in ways that shield them from bodily or emotional distress. Fitness practitioners combine digital tracking technologies with analog methods and enrol other human actors in recording, interpreting, questioning and tinkering with their data; in other words, they perform data work in ways that mend or prevent ruptures and brokenness and thus afford 'care'. We highlight the role of the personal trainer, who often complements or salvages the outputs of digital technologies. We argue that tracking has the capacity to afford care and wellness when it is emplaced within socialities and when actors are able to exercise their capacities and knowledge in ways that mitigate the data outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forensic psychiatric institutions are tasked with both containment and transformation, with securely policing the border between institution and society and readying patients for return to the community. Forensic institutions can thus be theorised as a form of 'rite of passage', engaged in a process of transformation which both navigates and demarcates social limits. This article contributes to literature on risk and control in clinical institutions by offering a novel theoretical synthesis of features of rites of passage and liminality, as facilitated by an art project in a forensic setting. Through the prism of the Graffiti and Wellbeing Project (GWP), an arts initiative, we explore the ways in which forensic institutions thus offer or impede opportunities for transformation. The project engendered a space for the transformation of difficult emotions and histories through the medium of art creating a liminal space of transformation within the confines of a secure institution. Drawing on Douglas, Kristeva and Bahktin, we argue that forensic institutions largely attempt to manage their own transgressive, marginal status, and the abject experiences of patients, through a recourse to order, suppression and sublimation. We argue for a wider range of responses to the transgressive and marginal experiences and behaviours prevalent in forensic settings, drawing on examples from the GWP. [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]

Men account for approximately 75% of the one million annual suicide deaths worldwide. Emerging research indicates a link between suicide and men's active pursuit of hegemonic masculinity via emotional restriction. However, little is known of the continuum of suicidal men's emotional practice, and particularly how men mobilise emotions to actively pursue or resist hegemonic masculine ideals. This theorised life‐history study aimed to explore the emotional lives of 18 Australian men who had attempted suicide. Findings indicate that men in this study experienced a range of emotions. However, during childhood, they learned that expressing emotions such as sadness reduced masculine standing, whereas expressing emotions such as anger through acts of violence could enhance masculine status. Although the gendering of emotions offered participants multiple avenues of action to pursue or contest masculine ideals, they remained vulnerable to suicide. For some men, it became impossible to conceal escalating feelings of distress. For other men, displays of anger and violence resulted in job loss, relationship breakdown or criminal conviction. Many participants indicated that suicide presented a means of ending painful emotions. Paradoxically, suicide could also become an alternative means of demonstrating masculinity, whereby the body became both the vehicle and object of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, the French National Consultative Ethics Committee expressed strong misgivings about the proposal to include the face among body parts that can be removed from deceased donors for organ transplantation. Yet, the first face transplant was performed a few months later. How do medical teams and patients deal with the singular nature of the face? I argue that what the face represents – from the medium of the donor's personal identity to an interchangeable organ – is not fixed. It emerges through the practices and can evolve through the interactions between medical professionals and patients. In the postoperative time, I show that patients receive potentially contradictory recommendations about how to integrate the organ: to consider it theirs and forget the donor, but also to thank the donor for the donation and never forget the origin of the graft. Based on the plurality of relationships developed by the patients with their donor, I revisit Maussian interpretative analyses of organ reception. The effects of giving a face vary both in terms of reciprocity and identity: the feeling of debt is variably felt and can be interpreted negatively or positively, and the experience is more or less transformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital media offer the chronically ill, especially those who experience related isolation, unparalleled opportunities to connect with others. This article asks, how do these individuals ascribe meaning to and use these media to manage their condition and related isolation? Using the concepts of affordance and emotional community, and drawing on the findings from an Australian study on patients' use of digital media, we examine individuals' ambivalent ascriptions of media, which are both feared and distrusted for the risks they present and embraced as invaluable tools of social connection. We argue that this ambivalence is explicable in terms of the communities to which the chronically ill belong which are founded on strong emotional bonds. In a context in which individuals tend to feel isolated through pain and/or stigmatisation, digital media may offer powerful means for sharing and affirming their experiences, the subjective benefits of which may outweigh the perceived risks. The article discusses the functions and features of digital media that the chronically ill value and distrust and concludes by considering the implications of our analysis for strategies to address the needs of people who feel isolated as a consequence of their condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While treatment is often withdrawn from patients in intensive care units (ICUs), few people outside the healthcare profession have witnessed a death under such circumstances. Family members who have made the decision to withdraw treatment may have expectations about the dying process, what constitutes a good death and how they should behave in an ICU based on popular prime‐time television series. An inductive comparative thematic coding strategy is therefore used to examine how death following treatment withdrawal as depicted in a US medical drama (Grey's Anatomy) differs from realities observed for 6 months fieldwork at an ICU in Canada. Three common frames (privacy, emotional control and memorialising) help patients' intimates normalise the unfamiliar experience and guide their behaviour during the event. However, discrepancies between media representations and experiences in the ICU, especially around the frames of timing of death and the physicality of the unbounded body (incontinence and agonal breathing), can traumatise them. The bereaved may be left viewing ventilator withdrawal and dying as chaotic processes and believing their loved one suffered through a bad death. Understanding these normative and discrepant frames should help healthcare professionals better prepare the public to witness death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health settings are fraught with emotion as clients address difficult life experiences and relational patterns. Clients spend a substantial amount of time together outside of structured therapy, but little is known about how these moments are potentially therapeutic, especially as sites of emotional change. We draw on interaction ritual chain theory to explore how negative emotions in situations outside of formal therapy can be transformed into positive emotions and facilitate personal change. The research is based upon a narrative ethnography of two therapeutic communities for individuals with a diagnosis of personality disorder. Despite the presence of negative transient emotions in these rituals, clients experienced positive feelings of solidarity and belonging, and the majority of clients reported increased feelings of confidence and positive change. Conversely, dynamics between clients showed clients were not always supportive of one another and at times, could exclude others, resulting in isolation and alienation. We argue interactions that generate feelings of inclusion or exclusion over time are a key component in whether clients gain positive or negative emotional feeling and experience personal change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A focus on early brain development has come to dominate expert child rearing advice over the past two decades. Recent scholars have noted a reinvigoration of the concept of attachment in this advice and changes in the ways that attachment is framed and understood. The extent to which the concept of attachment is drawn on, the way it is framed, and the consequences for mothers, families and parent‐child relationships is examined through a discursive analysis of a current Canadian parental education campaign. Findings support the argument that attachment is receiving a great deal of attention in brain‐based parenting education programmes as children's emotional development becomes increasingly prioritized. Attachment is presented as needing to be actively and continually built through expert‐guided empathetic and responsive parental behaviour, and is framed as crucial for the development of brain pathways that promote emotional strength and self‐regulation in children. Attachment‐building is also presented as requiring highly intensive parenting that falls overwhelmingly to mothers. The parent‐child relationship that is envisioned is one that is instrumental, lacking in affect and conducive to the creation of ideal self‐regulating neo‐liberal citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intense concern about obesity in the public imagination and in political, academic and media discourses has catalysed advocacy efforts to implement regulatory measures to reduce the occurrence of obesity in Australia and elsewhere. This article explores public attitudes towards the possible implementation of regulations to address obesity by analysing emotions within popular discourses. Drawing on reader comments attached to obesity-relevant news articles published on Australian news and current affairs websites, we examine how popular anxieties about the 'obesity crisis' and vitriol directed at obese individuals circulate alongside understandings of the appropriate role of government to legitimise regulatory reform to address obesity. Employing Ahmed's theorisation of 'affective economies' and broader literature on emotional cultures, we argue that obesity regulations achieve popular support within affective economies oriented to neoliberal and individualist constructions of obesity. These economies preclude constructions of obesity as a structural problem in popular discourse; instead positioning anti-obesity regulations as a government-endorsed vehicle for discrimination directed at obese people. Findings implicate a new set of ethical challenges for those championing regulatory reform for obesity prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine the treatment of psychosocial risks in public occupational health discourse in Finnish newspaper and magazine articles between the 1960s and 2000s, using discourse analysis. Building on class theories, our aim is to investigate how class expectations have been linked with the redefinition of occupational health risks during this period. Our results suggest that as social relations at the workplace became problematised in the occupational health discussions after the 1970s, the image of the hierarchical and naturally conflictual organisation was replaced by idealised middle-class notions of smoothly functioning, harmonious organisations that offered rewarding work experiences. However, this same period since the late 1970s has also been characterised by increasing economic competition and neoliberal market ideology. We conclude that the concern about work-related psychosocial risks and health problems expressed in Finnish newspaper and magazine articles during the last three decades has been shaped in many respects by a collision between the dominant middle-class expectations of harmony and equality and the neoliberal production of competition and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the relationship between perceptions of pain and the social characteristics of the individual, with a focus on the role of gender in the process, with an emphasis on the meaning of 'lay' understanding of the phenomena of pain. In order to broaden the definition of pain a multi-method form of enquiry was adopted and significant gender differences were found in the emphasis on the role of the emotions and the social expectations of the ability to cope in experiences and perceptions of pain. Analysis of the qualitative fieldwork revealed how experiences of pain incorporate feelings and vulnerabilities, existential and religious beliefs as well the sensory components. The attribution, by both sexes, of the superior capacities of women in coping with pain are linked to their biological and reproductive functioning, but are underpinned by cultural expectations of roles and socialisation. The 'findings' of the study both reflect the particular experiences of people living in a multi-racial inner-city area, and provide a basis for developing new approaches to the understanding of pain, and the relationships between pain, gender, culture and embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]