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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2007.00499.x Byline: Alan Radley (1), Susan E. Bell (2) Keywords: activism; art; breast cancer; photography; social movements; social practices; visual images; visual sociology Abstract: Abstract This article discusses the role of 'artworks' produced by women with breast cancer in the context of breast cancer activism. We argue that such works play a key role in making visible and collective the ideological issues surrounding this disease. They do this through their potential for anchoring social practices relating to its treatment and what might be done about it (Klawiter 2004, Swidler 2001). The article focuses upon the work of two women artists diagnosed with breast cancer - the British photographer Jo Spence, and Martha Hall, an American who made artist's books. We examine specific works from these collections, and the context of their production. In this way we show how and why artworks are important in establishing visual and discursive space related to social practices associated with disease regimes, and how they provide emancipatory potential for women living with breast cancer. We argue that artworks work through and on bodies to enable a redemptive and emancipatory potential. As mediators of representations of illness, they deserve attention from sociologists researching social movements, the sharing of illness experience and strategies for survival. Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University (2)Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College, USA Article note: Address for correspondence: Alan Radley, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics. LE 11 3 TU, e-mail: A.R.Radley@lboro.ac.uk

Issues regarding first-person accounts of terminal illness as giving the authors a sense of freedom and understanding of their suffering are discussed. The horrors integral to such accounts are basic to the author's symbolisation of an illness-world and use myth to understand suffering.

This paper argues that people's views of health and illness are best understood as accounts that they give to others. In that sense, such beliefs are neither the expression of fixed inner attitudes, nor evidence for shared social representations. Instead, we emphasise the importance of seeing health talk as both ideological and dilemmatic. The paper explores the way in which individuals who speak of health (or illness) in general must also give an account of their health in particular. Reviewing the distinction between 'private' and 'public' accounts, the article discusses the various rhetorical devices by which this is achieved. This shows how people's talk about health both defines their social fitness and exemplifies their claims to being ill or healthy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the problem of adjustment to chronic illness in terms of the demands of the patient's body and the constraints of culture. Criticism is offered of explanations which reduce such adjustment to a form of functional adaptation, either to symptoms or to social expectations taken separately. The argument is made that social constraints are embodied in everyday conduct, while bodily changes are made sensible through meanings engendered within discourse. Utilising findings from a study of coronary patients and their spouses the paper describes differences between the situations of those who confront and oppose illness and those who modify their lives as they accommodate to it. A discussion is offered of the different transformations of illness experience as these relate to the role-settings of those concerned. This is used to set out a general thesis on style as a contextualisation of iilnessexperience, articulated in the co-ordination of bodily action and social categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that conflict is an inescapable feature of National Health Service organisational life, and that it is legitimate area of study. It describes a number of powerful coalitions whose interactions can produce conflict as they attempt to influence the distribution of scarce resources. In particular, it focusses on the beliefs and power of a 'practitioner interests' coalition and an 'administrative ethic' coalition. To survive in this world of coalitions, NHS general managers need to assert their own positions. Are they to be agents of the existing coalitions or can they construct their own and achieve its dominance? The paper concludes by discussing how a distinctive general management coalition might emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]