Sahra Gibbon, Carola Tize, Taylor Riley, Tatiane Muniz
{"title":"The Complex Dynamics of Healthism in Birth Cohort Studies: Comparative Perspectives From the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Brazil and Portugal.","authors":"Sahra Gibbon, Carola Tize, Taylor Riley, Tatiane Muniz","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70245","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70245","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Longitudinal birth cohort studies are an under-examined context for considering the dynamics of healthism. This article presents a comparative perspective from the 'Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts' study, which takes birth cohorts as an ethnographic object of knowledge-making, social practice and participation in the Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Drawing from ethnographic research with participants and professionals involved in cohort data collection, we examine how, in the routine monitoring and measuring of bodies and lives in cohort studies, 'healthism', as an individualised form of moral self-responsibility for health, is entangled with medicalisation. Healthism is also at stake in the way that individual cohort test results are communicated and received. Yet the relational dynamics of cohort studies, which encompass but also exceed the scope of healthism, are also shaped by the precarity of public health infrastructures and closely entangled with the motivational desire of cohort participants, as birth cohorts can act as a stopgap for public health failures. In this way, we demonstrate how birth cohorts are an important context for considering the politics of health and how medicalisation is entangled with healthism in cohort data collection, even as this unfolds in tension with efforts to collectively intervene in public health.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70245"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13447927/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148685698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cities as Atmospheric Infrastructures: An Analysis of Activist Responses to Respiratory Illness in the Czech Republic.","authors":"Susanna Trnka","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70260","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70260","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Cities and the activities urban infrastructures enable have long been noted for making demonstrable impacts on the surrounding atmosphere. Cities also provide unique social and political infrastructures, promoting particular forms of cohesion and fracture, including opportunities for promoting political consciousness and inspiring collective activism. This paper introduces the concept of 'atmospheric infrastructures' to examine both of these facets of urban health and the dynamic relationship between them. It builds on a growing literature on 'affective atmospheres' that explores how collectively experienced emotions and senses are linked to specific locales and an emerging line of scholarship that foregrounds the duality of atmospheres as both affective spaces and constitutive of the air we breathe. Frequently underplayed, however, in analyses of affective atmospheres is the role of (human and nonhuman) agency. I propose viewing urban spaces as atmospheric infrastructures in order to highlight issues of collective responsibility in the constitution of both kinds of (meteorological and affective/political) atmospheres. My analysis is situated in responses to air pollution in the Czech Republic, where social activists frame respiratory health as a citizenship issue, fighting for the health of the city (rather than of individuals), and value civic education as much as protesting against pollution.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70260"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13554464/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148913369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brenda Agyeiwaa Poku, Natasha Nicholls, Alison Pilnick, Karl Michael Atkin
{"title":"Invisible Navigators: Migrant Parents and the Everyday Labour of Managing Sickle Cell Disease in the UK.","authors":"Brenda Agyeiwaa Poku, Natasha Nicholls, Alison Pilnick, Karl Michael Atkin","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70262","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70262","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Migrant parents of children and young people (CYP) living with sickle cell disease (SCD) must manage complex care needs within unfamiliar healthcare systems. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrant parents in England, this study examines how migration reshapes healthcare navigation. Using navigation as an analytical lens, the findings show that parents act as de facto navigators, coordinating services across healthcare, education and welfare domains without structured support. Beyond practical coordination, navigation involved sustained relational, emotional and identity work. Parents described learning to interpret new institutional rules, (re)negotiating expectations of 'good' parenting in a different national context and managing stigma linked to illness, ethnicity and immigration status. Migration intensified caregiving responsibilities through disrupted support networks, legal and economic constraints and uneven access to resources. Although UK services were valued for specialist expertise, parents reported the need for continual self-advocacy within fragmented systems. The study extends navigation scholarship by foregrounding migrant parents' unpaid and often unrecognised labour and demonstrates how healthcare navigation is shaped by intersecting migration, policy and racialised contexts. The findings highlight the importance of embedding condition-specific navigation support within existing specialist services.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70262"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13570405/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148956665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The 'Ghost in the Shell' of NHS Patient Data Policies: News Media on care.data's Haunting of the General Practice Data for Planning and Research.","authors":"Paraskevas Vezyridis","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70251","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70251","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study examines the controversy surrounding NHS England's suspended 'General Practice Data for Planning and Research' (GPDPR) programme, which aimed to automatically extract personally identifiable coded health data into a central data repository. Drawing on the concept of 'hauntology', I analyse UK news media coverage to explore how the legacy of the earlier, abandoned care.data programme shaped stakeholder opposition and policy debates around GPDPR's data governance. Findings suggest that this programme was often seen as a 'déjà vu' of care.data. Key policy challenges that undermined trust and acceptability included concerns over access to patient data by commercial companies, cumbersome opt-out processes and the absence of shared governance procedures and meaningful ownership arrangements. Comparatively, care.data faced greater political resistance despite lower perceived intrusiveness, highlighting the complex interplay between public engagement, political context and programme design. This study advances understanding of how historical policy failures linger in societal memory, affecting the receptivity and acceptability of subsequent data initiatives. It offers actionable insights for policymakers designing comparable public health data programmes that balance health system improvements, economic growth and public trust.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70251"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13481816/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148797866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Amanda van Beinum, Vanessa Gruben, Aimee J Sarti, Sonny Dhanani, Lindsey McKay, Jennifer A Chandler
{"title":"Donation Care Work: Family Members' Contributions to Deceased Organ Donation Following Determination of Death Using Circulatory Criteria.","authors":"Amanda van Beinum, Vanessa Gruben, Aimee J Sarti, Sonny Dhanani, Lindsey McKay, Jennifer A Chandler","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70257","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70257","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Family members of potential deceased organ donors are often portrayed as gatekeepers to the individual experience of organ donation. We argue the success of deceased donation as an institution depends on often-unrecognised family labour that occurs after consent. Building on feminist notions of care work, we propose the concept of 'donation care work' to conceptualise the combination of emotion work, end-of-life care, and death work that family members perform to support efforts for donation while facing imminent loss. We interviewed 38 family members of potential deceased organ donors in Canada. Family member narratives revealed ongoing contributions throughout donation attempts, including managing uncertainty and reconciling difficult emotions before, during and after the donation attempt. Understanding family contributions to deceased donation as work introduces capacity for labour as a contributing factor potentially impacting willingness to consent. The concept of donation care work furthers the sociology of donation by offering a framework to map the essential efforts of family members and the institutional reliance on their labour, even when donation attempts do not lead to transplantable organs.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70257"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13547768/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148901183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Before, Behind and Beyond: Life Stories and Identity in Dementia Care.","authors":"Tove Harnett, Glenn Möllergren","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70254","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70254","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Life stories are widely promoted in person-centred dementia care as tools to preserve the identity of the 'person behind the dementia'. However, as cognitive decline progresses, staff often face dilemmas when current expressions of preference appear to contradict a person's documented past, for example, a devout Muslim requesting pork or a lifelong teetotaller showing interest in alcohol. The aim of this study is to explore how dementia care staff reason about situations in which life story information conflicts with a person's present identity and expressed preferences. Using Atchley's continuity theory (1989), we explore how staff conceptualise the relationship between external continuity (roles, habits and life patterns) and internal continuity (self-perception and identity). Based on six focus group interviews with dementia care staff in Sweden, we demonstrate that the frequently cited dichotomy between 'seeing the person' and 'seeing the condition' is overly simplistic; instead, staff adopt flexible and dynamic understandings of identity that accommodate change over time. Our findings suggest the need to move beyond binary framings and indicate that thinking in terms of the person before, behind and beyond dementia offers a more nuanced framework for understanding identity in dementia care.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70254"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13479039/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148761290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"More Than a Role Dispute: Physician Associates and the Changing Grounds of Medical Authority.","authors":"Louise Ashley","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70250","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70250","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how the legitimacy of physician associates (PAs) is constructed and contested in English medicine. Drawing on Critical Discursive Psychology, it analyses formal submissions to a government commissioned independent review of medical associate professions from the British Medical Association, General Medical Council and United Medical Associate Professionals to ask: What does conflict over PAs reveal about fractures in medical status and power? The findings show that these actors do not simply disagree about a new occupational role but mobilise shared concerns, especially around safety, standards and responsibility, through competing legitimacy logics. For the BMA, legitimacy is framed predominantly through boundary protection and the exclusivity of medical expertise; for the GMC, through regulatory governance and system assurance; and for UMAP, through workforce contribution and professional integration. Conceptually, this article extends jurisdictional accounts by showing that contemporary role disputes concern not only who controls clinical tasks but also which criteria and institutions are authorised to validate healthcare work. The PA controversy therefore reveals a pluralisation and institutional fragmentation of the grounds of medical authority, rather than its straightforward decline or reproduction.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70250"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13470463/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148726940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jennifer M Goldberg, Amaya Perez-Brumer, Lori E Ross
{"title":"Interrogating the Effects of Technologies of Pregnancy Surveillance on Queer, Trans and Nonbinary Midwifery Service-Users.","authors":"Jennifer M Goldberg, Amaya Perez-Brumer, Lori E Ross","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70253","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70253","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Queer, transgender and nonbinary (QTNB) people access midwifery services, yet little is known about their experiences of midwifery care. Our qualitative study used critical narrative inquiry to examine how QTNB midwifery service-users in Ontario, Canada, experience cisheteronormativity in healthcare. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 14 participants, our analysis examines the effects of biomedicalisation on QTNB people who navigate these systems. Our findings show that QTNB people access and participate in technologies of pregnancy surveillance, which deploy information-seeking practices that collect information about the genetic makeup of the baby, conception and paternity. These 'lines of inquiry' present in mundane but insidious ways, embedded within cisheteronormative assumptions about paternity and conception. Stemming from broader biomedical discourse that views sex and gender as one and the same, genetically determined and binary, the discursive effects of lines of inquiry render invisible QTNB identities, family building processes and kinship structures. We explore this tension, showing how lines of inquiry have unequal effects of surveillance across queer family building, kinship and identity, and how QTNB resist dominant discourse around sex, gender and sexuality. Findings can be used by perinatal health professionals to better care for QTNB perinatal service-users as they navigate technologies of surveillance during pregnancy.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70253"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13479333/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148761128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rare Diseases as Epistemic Objects: Exploring the Moral Role of Health Systems.","authors":"Nicolás Schöngut-Grollmus, Dolores Steverlynck, Fernanda Manríquez-Castillo, Sebastián Rojas-Navarro","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70255","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70255","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores how rare diseases reveal the moral and epistemic foundations of healthcare systems. Based on narrative interviews with 11 Chilean patients and 10 professionals, this study shows how the absence of standardised protocols-such as clinical guidelines, treatment pathways and referral standards-exposes informal, discretionary and morally complex decision-making processes. Contrary to the ideal of evidence-based care, rare disease treatment often relies on personal networks, institutional gaps and improvisation. We frame rare diseases as epistemic objects, conditions that challenge classification systems and highlight the normative assumptions behind health decisions. Introducing the concept of decisional justice, we examine how health systems support (or fail to support) fair and accountable decision-making. Patients become epistemic activists, whereas professionals navigate fragmented institutions with little guidance. Rare diseases act as diagnostic tools that expose structural inequities and the invisibility of certain conditions. They reveal how ignorance can translate into neglect, shifting responsibility to individuals and deepening disparities. We argue that healthcare systems are not only logistical but also moral infrastructures, shaping what can be known and acted upon. Thus, health justice must also involve moral recognition and epistemic inclusion, not just resource distribution.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70255"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13500867/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148809060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chloe Halpenny, Elaine Power, Lia Kirkpatrick, Tracy Smith-Carrier
{"title":"A Seat at the (Dinner) Table: Food and Eating Practices in the Ontario Basic Income Pilot.","authors":"Chloe Halpenny, Elaine Power, Lia Kirkpatrick, Tracy Smith-Carrier","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70261","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70261","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is strong quantitative evidence that the risk of food insecurity declines when social programmes increase low-income households' available income. However, there is little qualitative research that examines how food practices change with a sudden increase in income for poor households. Using a Bourdieusian-informed theoretical framework, supplemented by recent literature on dignity, we analysed 79 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with recipients of the prematurely cancelled Ontario Basic Income Pilot (OBIP). Interviewees described how increased income improved their ability to afford enough and better-quality food, decreased their engagement in unsatisfactory survival strategies, mediated stronger relations with family and friends and facilitated more pleasure in food practices. These results reflect a 'logic of practice' in a very different context than Bourdieu's 1960s France: a consumer society where health is a 'super value' and belonging is gained through consumption. Our analysis suggests that for those living in poverty, income, not habitus, is the most important contributor to the logic of food practices. Our results contradict popular myths about the food practices of those who live in poverty and lend support to the call for a minimum income floor, adequate to meet basic needs, to promote health, household food security and dignity.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 7","pages":"e70261"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13559196/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148921029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}