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This paper explores the potential of the perspective of epistemic injustice to reconcile medical sociology's attention to the micro level of experience and interpersonal exchange, and disability studies' focus on the macro level of oppressive structures. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the concept of epistemic injustice and its key instances—testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory injustice. We also consider previous applications of the concept in the fields of health care and disability, and we contextualise our investigation by discussing key features of postsocialism from the perspective of epistemic injustice. In the second part, we explore specific epistemic injustices experienced by people who use disability support by drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted with parents of disabled children in present‐day Bulgaria. In our conclusion, we revisit our methodological and theoretical points about the potential of epistemic injustice to facilitate mutually beneficial exchanges between medical sociology and disability studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shift towards recovery‐oriented mental health care has led to the extensive growth of peer support in contemporary service delivery. When enacting peer support, peer workers (PWs) use their lived experiences of mental illness to provide support to individuals experiencing mental health difficulties. While PWs are increasingly an integrated part of mental health services, the way in which peer support unfolds in everyday practices remains understudied. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from Danish mental health centres, this paper investigates how peer workers and users enact experiential knowledge and expertise to support one another. Theoretically, this paper draws on a micro‐sociological approach that comprehends expertise as an interactional accomplishment enacted within institutional arrangements. First, the analysis shows how PWs and users develop affective relations based on shared illness experiences that enable the enactment of expertise. Second, it demonstrates how PWs and users engage in these relations by exchanging sympathy and knowledge according to different situational demands. Third, it shows how experiences of relational limitations make service users contest the value of experiential knowledge and PWs' position as valid experts. Centrally, this paper contributes to a general discussion of expertise and the implications of bringing lived experiences into mental health services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the experience of two Romani and three non‐Romani scholars in knowledge production on the health and social inequalities experienced by European Roma populations. Together, we explore how we might better account for, and work against, the complex web of dynamic oppressions embedded within processes of academic knowledge production. Our aim is to encourage careful scrutiny through which sociologists of health and illness might better recognise our own complicity with oppression and identify concrete actions towards transforming our research practices. Drawing on a well‐known domains of racism typology (Annual Review of Public Health, 40, 2019, 105), we use examples from our own work to illustrate three interconnected domains of oppression in which we have found ourselves entangled (structural, cultural and interpersonal). A new conceptual framework is proposed as an aid to understanding the spectrum of different "types" of complicity (voluntary–involuntary, conscious–unconscious) that one might reproduce across all three domains. We conclude by exploring how sociologists of health and illness might promote a more actively anti‐racist research agenda, identifying and challenging subtle, hidden and embedded negative ideologies and practices as well as more obviously oppressive ones. We hope these reflections will help revitalise important conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed account of how surgeons perceived and used a device‐procedure that caused widespread patient harm: transvaginal mesh for the treatment of pelvic floor disorders in women. Drawing from interviews with 27 surgeons in Canada, the UK, the United States and France and observations of major international medical conferences in North America and Europe between 2015 and 2018, we describe the commercially driven array of operative variations in the use of transvaginal mesh and show that surgeons' understanding of their hands‐on, sensory experience with these variations is central to explaining patient harm. Surgeons often developed preferences for how to manage actual and anticipated dangers of transvaginal mesh procedures through embodied operative adjustments, but collectively the meaning of these preferences was fragmented, contested and deferred. We critically reflect on surgeons' understandings of their operative experience, including the view that such experience is not evidence. The harm in this case poses a challenge to some ways of thinking about uncertainty and errors in medical sociology, and calls for attention to a specific feature of surgical work: the extent and persistence of operative practices that elude classification as right or wrong but are still most certainly better and worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]