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The materialist thread within health sociology has observed a clear gradient linking inequalities in health with measures of social class and poverty. More recently, Bourdieu's approach to social class complemented the 'economic capital' of Marxist analysis with 'symbolic' capitals such as 'social' and 'cultural'. However, efforts to assess how symbolic capital interacts with health disparities reveal complex or contradictory effects. In this paper, we re‐materialise the study of health and social position via a new materialist focus on the interactions between humans and non‐human matter (NHM). We analyse empirical data to disclose the range of human/NHM interactions in daily life, and how these affect people's health status. These interactions establish physical, psychological and social opportunities and constraints on what human bodies can do, contributing to relative advantages and disadvantages. We argue for a revised materialist understanding of sociomaterial position as constituted by a 'thousand tiny dis/advantages', and suggest that health and wellbeing are inextricably linked to dis/advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obstetric violence is gaining recognition as a worldwide problem manifesting in a range of geopolitical contexts. While global public health attention is turning to this issue, there has been a lack of theoretical engagement by feminist psychologists with the phenomenon of obstetric violence. This paper contributes to the literature on obstetric violence via a feminist social constructionist analysis of “marginalized” and low-income South African women’s narratives of giving birth in public sector obstetric contexts. Drawing on interviews conducted in 2012 with 35 black, low-income women living in Cape Town, South Africa, the analysis focuses on obstetric violence as a relational, disciplinary, and productive process that has implications for the construction of women’s subjectivities and agency during childbirth. The findings focus on relational constructions of violence and agency in women’s narratives, including (a) the performance of docility as an act of ambiguous agency and (2) resistant bodies and modes of discipline. Framed within a Foucauldian approach to power and using the concept of assemblage, I argue that obstetric violence needs to be conceptualized as more than isolated acts involving individual perpetrators and victims. Instead, the analysis shows that obstetric violence functions as a mode of discipline embedded in normative relations of class, gender, race, and medical power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for the poor, the marginalised and socially excluded to live healthier and longer lives has in recent times become paramount in the development literature and policy discussions seeking to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In response to this, attempts are being made to redirect the research focus to examine socio-economic factors underpinning disease occurrence and ill health for health planning policies and practices to benefit the poor and vulnerable in society. Tliis paper explores the relationship between socio-economic conditions and health outcomes. It identifies and examines through participatory rural assessment techniques, basic socio- economic factors acting as significant pathways through which poverty increases the susceptibility of rural households to diseases. It seeks to address the reasons why the poor are poorer in health in rural communities of the Amansie West district of Ghana. This paper thus emphasises how social stratification and inequalities could affect quality of life of people in any given society, hence supporting the theory of social suffering and its implications on societal health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]