{"title":"Contextualising, Conceptualising and Constructing At-Homeness: Towards an Integrative Framework for Residential Care.","authors":"Jialiang Cui, Jialing Wu","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70230","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70230","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The concept of at-homeness has been increasingly adopted in residential care to describe a metaphorical sense of being \"at home\". Within a sector often criticised for displacing residents from familiar environments, at-homeness has come to symbolise the ideal experiential outcome of care. Yet, despite a growing body of work enriching our understanding of what at-homeness entails, existing conceptualisations tend to overlook the processes through which at-homeness is personally and multiply constructed and are shaped predominantly by studies of older adults in long-term care contexts. To address these limitations, a qualitative study, employing a user-involved approach, was conducted in Hong Kong, incorporating in-depth interviews with 60 residents of mental health residential services and ethnographic observations across three hostels. Analysis shows that at-homeness is shaped through boundary-setting and bonding between the self and three arenas-social relations (\"people\"), material environments and temporal orientations. Residents interpreted core qualities of at-homeness across personal, relational, material and temporal dimensions and their constructions were guided by distinct logics involving self-appraisal, temporal integration, relational attunement and socio-cultural grounding. The study proposes an integrative framework that reframes at-homeness as a dynamic, negotiated process, offering new insights for advancing theory and strengthening methodological and practice approaches in residential care.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70230"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13333906/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148391686","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}
Francesco Miele, Ludovica Rubini, Veronica Moretti, Martina Consoloni
{"title":"Algorithmic Choreography: Redefining Human and Non-Human Relations in Digital Health.","authors":"Francesco Miele, Ludovica Rubini, Veronica Moretti, Martina Consoloni","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70229","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70229","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article contributes to the growing debate on algorithms in digital health, which has expanded alongside the integration of algorithmic technologies into diverse healthcare practices and contexts. Although much of the existing literature adopts a deterministic perspective, focusing on the impact of algorithms on society, we propose a different approach. Drawing on the concept of algorithmic choreography, we show how humans and algorithmic technologies \"gear together\" in shared performances. Based on an ethnographic study in a nursing home for people with dementia, we examine a telemonitoring algorithmic system designed to prevent adverse events and how it enters into relations with the humans inhabiting this healthcare organization. The system gives rise to two distinct choreographies: night monitoring, in which staff use it for real-time observation of residents' movements and quantified decision-making, where algorithmically generated indexes support longitudinal assessments of residents' health status. We argue that in both choreographies, humans remain central rather than passive recipients of innovation. Care professionals give or withhold agency from algorithms, sustain their functioning and engage in collective improvisations through which human-nonhuman interactions are continually reshaped.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70229"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13366560/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148437723","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":"(Un)recognisable Parents-to-Be: Reproductive Governance in Queer Family-Making via Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Denmark.","authors":"Tobias Sønderby Jørgensen","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70228","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70228","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) offer parenthood to queer individuals and fulfil their reproductive desires. However, accessing ART services often connects queer people to healthcare institutions that cause discomfort and violence within their community. Few studies have examined how the opportunities and adversities of healthcare services affect queer individuals' experiences within ART clinics. I analysed 25 in-depth interviews with transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer individuals and gay men to assess how queer parents-to-be navigate family-making within ART clinics. Using a framework of reproductive governance and frames of recognisability, I found that reproductive governance shapes and polices access to ART services. Specific bodies and family structures are produced as recognisable prospective parents through frames of recognisability. Gestating bodies, reproductive subjects and family structures become reproductive governance sites that control access to ART services for queer people. Consequently, queer people engage in practices of staying recognisable to access ART services. I discuss how capacities to remain recognisable and access ART services are unequally distributed within the queer community and how participants' navigation of institutional expectations entails moments of queering and conforming to heteronormative ideals of family-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70228"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13380981/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148520861","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}
Tim Rhodes, Hannah Cowan, Zaira Clarke, Praveena Fernes, Sammie Mcfarland, Helen Ward
{"title":"Young People Navigating the Looping Effects of Long Covid: Exhausting Agency and the 'Ongoing After' of Pandemic.","authors":"Tim Rhodes, Hannah Cowan, Zaira Clarke, Praveena Fernes, Sammie Mcfarland, Helen Ward","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70210","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70210","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Seeing beyond the COVID-19 pandemic as an extraordinary spectacle situated in the past, we draw on qualitative research with young people to trace experiences of Long Covid as 'looping effects' of entangling physical and social impacts which intersect with, and extend, those of pandemic. Navigating the capacity to do ordinary things becomes highly contingent, and exhausting work, in the face of Long Covid. The physical impacts of illness, including fatigue, are materialised in altering biographical and social relationships, and managing the 'social life' of Long Covid is a key concern. The lifetimes of Long Covid and pandemic also feed into one another. Configurations of the COVID-19 pandemic as a thing of the past, and social responses felt discounting of the Long Covid experience, enact ongoing illness as 'out of sync', and contribute as elements of exhausted agency and extended precarity. The social impacts of the pandemic looping with Long Covid become iterations without clear end; events ongoing in the living present. Understanding how Long Covid extends the 'ongoing after' of pandemic highlights the need for lasting social support for affected young people.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70210"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13317152/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148353423","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}
Justien Dingelstad, Francisca Grommé, Claartje Ter Hoeven, Iris Wallenburg
{"title":"An Algorithm at the Table at Multidisciplinary Diagnostic Meetings: A Dramaturgical Analysis.","authors":"Justien Dingelstad, Francisca Grommé, Claartje Ter Hoeven, Iris Wallenburg","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70213","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70213","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper focuses on how a radiological classification algorithm temporarily became part of existing diagnostic deliberations between different medical specialists. It describes a participatory ethnographic case study in which the output of the algorithm was presented by the first author during weekly multidisciplinary neuro-oncology meetings. Following the dramaturgical framework of deliberations by Hajer and adhering to the sociology of diagnosis, we focus on how the algorithm interacted with the established deliberative dynamics of the meetings. We show that by the algorithm's presence, physicians were prompted to speculate about what the algorithm could mean for their collective diagnosis. They did not foresee an independent or leading role for the algorithm yet speculated about how, when and by whom the algorithmic output should be presented. Some physicians followed dominant AI tropes of self-evidence and objectivity, whereas others sought ways to contextualise and question the algorithmic output. We argue that following a dramaturgical framework unveils important questions that must be addressed to make algorithms fit into existing diagnostic practices, such as who represents the algorithm, when and how.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70213"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13287552/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148302916","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":"How Algorithmic Technologies 'Constitute' the Older Body: A Study of Fall-Detection Wearables.","authors":"Geoffrey Mead, Barbara B Neves, Alex Broom","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70219","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70219","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The cultural politics of the 'problematic' ageing body have led to a search for solutions in the form of algorithmic technologies. In this article, we look at one problem associated with the ageing body-unintentional falls-and one proposed algorithmic intervention: wearable fall-detection technology. In dialogue with sociologists concerned with the cultural politics of the older body, we aim to understand what contribution this fledgling technology makes to how the older body is 'constituted'. To do this, we examine a sample of datasets containing measurements of individuals' movements and falls (which researchers have made available to train algorithms for use in fall-detection wearables). In contrast to existing attempts to grasp how older users are scripted into technology, which focus on explicit ideas about them, we trace how individual subjects are formatted in these datasets. We find that these individuals become fragmented in the data, rendered into movements abstracted from the bodies that carry them out and the locations in which they take place. The older body is constituted, then, as a risky, deviant set of movements through space, irreducible to its component parts.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70219"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13306533/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148332516","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":"A Different Position: Protest Medicine and the Limits of Professional Neutrality.","authors":"Cristian Montenegro","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70243","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70243","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Protests are a persistent feature of contemporary urban life, often producing mass injuries through police repression. Yet the role of medical care in these contexts-especially when provided by informal collectives-remains understudied. Drawing on 21 in-depth interviews with members of volunteer medical brigades during Chile's 2019-2020 Estallido Social, this paper examines how care was improvised, coordinated and transformed under conditions of sustained police violence, where more than 3500 people were wounded and 36 died. The analysis explores how brigade members interpreted harm, navigated the collapse of medical neutrality, which was first denied by the state and then renounced by brigade members, and embedded rudimentary clinical practice within the protest itself. The paper proposes the concept of protest medicine. Unlike security-based approaches that presuppose the legitimacy of state action, protest medicine is a grassroots, politically entangled form of medical care shaped by the spatial, ethical and affective logics of protest. In doing medicine outside and against the state, protest medicine foregrounds a form of healthcare rooted in proximity, solidarity and resistance rather than neutrality, regulation and order, opening space to rethink the social and political functions of medicine when the state is a source of harm.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70243"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13377936/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148472463","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}
Christopher R Browning, Bethany Boettner, Catherine A Calder, Elisabeth Root
{"title":"Economic Cynicism, COVID-19 and Deaths of Despair in Rural Ohio Counties.","authors":"Christopher R Browning, Bethany Boettner, Catherine A Calder, Elisabeth Root","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70227","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70227","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research on urban community effects on health has considered a range of collective social processes as potential links between economic disadvantage and health. We extend this focus to deaths of despair (DoD; drug overdose mortality and suicide) in rural counties by examining the association between a novel indicator of economic cynicism (perceptions that local communities have been 'left behind' economically) and DoD. We also consider a range of other aspects of social climate potentially relevant to health, including social network ties, collective efficacy and social and physical disorder. We draw on data from the 2018 Ohio Community Resilience Study to estimate county-level social process measures. Multilevel models of 2018-2022 age-adjusted DoD rates in 39 rural Ohio counties indicate that economic cynicism is associated with prepandemic rates of DoD and COVID-19 pandemic-associated increases in drug overdose mortality. Generalised structural equation models indicate that economic cynicism attenuates the association between economic disadvantage and drug overdose mortality by roughly 27% and the association with suicide by 50%. We discuss the importance of community-level social processes as factors in understanding rural area vulnerability to DoD.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70227"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13343394/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148405520","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}
Emerich Daroya, Martin French, Colin Hastings, Andrea Krüsi, Stephen Molldrem, Maureen Owino, Ryan Peck, Amy Wah, Alexander McClelland
{"title":"'It's Primarily Around Their Viral Load': Public Health Decision-Making and HIV Risk Assemblages in Ontario, Canada.","authors":"Emerich Daroya, Martin French, Colin Hastings, Andrea Krüsi, Stephen Molldrem, Maureen Owino, Ryan Peck, Amy Wah, Alexander McClelland","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70220","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70220","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In Ontario, Canada, public health authorities can issue and enforce orders to people living with HIV (PLWH). However, how public health practitioners determine when someone's behaviours constitute 'significant' risk remains underexplored. We drew on assemblage theory to examine how HIV risk is co-constituted through the interplay among biomedical technologies, institutional practices, legal frameworks and social discourses. We conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with public health personnel and used reflexive thematic analysis. Five interrelated themes emerged. First, high viral load was considered a potential risk indicator when associated with high-risk activities. Second, discontinuity in HIV care may flag individuals for intervention. Third, co-infection with sexually transmissible and blood-borne infections (STBBI) triggered a viral load review to assess HIV exposure potential. Fourth, noncompliance with public health directives positioned PLWH as needing management. Fifth, Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U) discourses have reconfigured and neutralised risk, functioning as a technology of reflexive governance. However, uptake of U = U was described as uneven across Ontario's public health units, leading to variable, and sometimes coercive, approaches. By conceptualising HIV risk as emergent, this study challenges individualised notions of responsibility and highlights the relational production of risk. Adoption of U = U and equity-based public health practices is needed to ensure nonpunitive HIV responses.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70220"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13287548/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148303003","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":"In Search of Genetic Agency: On the Uses and Actionability of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Test Results in Biohacking Practices.","authors":"Carsten Stage","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70237","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70237","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The article examines why and with what consequences biohacking individuals use direct-to-consumer genetic tests (DTC GTs). Based on thematic coding of 15 semi-structured interviews, it argues that these users generally see themselves as capable of generating actionable knowledge to optimise future health by manipulating their 'milieu'. DTC GTs are integrated into this perspective as a knowledge technology for prevention and optimisation. However, informants often find it difficult to translate DTC test results into concrete action and the study identifies their different strategies for making this type of knowledge actionable. These include monitoring risk conditions, changing or reinforcing existing lifestyle practices, engaging in trial-and-error experimentation or postponing action whilst awaiting more advanced knowledge. The article furthermore outlines the relational dilemmas experienced by the informants as a type of consequence of taking DTC GTs. Overall, the article shows the various ways that a highly knowledge-oriented user group navigates DTC test results by relying on an 'epigenetic imaginary' that reframes genetic risk as open to intervention, but also how it struggles to close the gap between test results and the health-optimising actions that are so central for biohacking practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70237"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13367029/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148437710","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}