Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-07-01Epub Date: 2026-06-15DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2026.2670273
Violeta Alarcão
{"title":"Mapping menstrual stigma through emotions: a reflexive analysis of systematic reviews as cultural artifacts.","authors":"Violeta Alarcão","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2670273","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2670273","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Menstruation is not only a biological process but also an emotional and sociocultural phenomenon. Understanding it requires attention to lived experiences and to the scholarly narratives that represent them. This paper adopts a reflexive approach to examine how emotions mediate menstrual stigma by conducting a secondary thematic analysis of two systematic qualitative reviews - one focused on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the other on high-income countries (HICs). Drawing on over 180 studies across 51 countries, I analyse not only the patterns reported but also the epistemic lenses through which these patterns are constructed. While emotions such as shame, fear, and embarrassment appear across both contexts, the reviews frame them through different classificatory schemes, such as taboos, secrecy, and internalised stigma or gender norms, that reflect distinct epistemic cultures rather than inherent cultural differences. By tracing how these categories are produced through layered processes of interpretation and disciplinary framings, the analysis highlights the need to resist the essentialization of LMICs/HICs differences. Emotions thus provide a critical lens not only for understanding menstrual stigma but also for examining the production of knowledge about it.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"232-243"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148254014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-07-01Epub Date: 2026-05-27DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2026.2670289
Isabel Mudford
{"title":"Strategising LGBTQ health.","authors":"Isabel Mudford","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2670289","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2670289","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Over the last decade, LGBTQ health has emerged as a distinct subcategory within Australian public health systems, evidenced by the development of LGBTQ health strategies by most state and territory governments. These strategies have arisen from decades of strategic advocacy on the part of government advisors, public servants, LGBTQ health organisations and advocates. This article is an analysis of Australian state and territory LGBTQ health strategies, published between 2019 and 2022. Along with overall analysis of their position within the formation and government of LGBTQ health, I pay particular attention to the historiographies they tell, their various commitments to epidemiological data collection, and how they constitute LGBTQ people as belonging to the imagined 'public' of public health. Through these examinations, I argue that LGBTQ health is a project of biocitizenship that makes possible certain forms of public recognition and the attention of public health systems but at the cost of narrowing focus towards the subjects, publics and problems legible and governable within the problem space of health and illness.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"140-155"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148044294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-07-01Epub Date: 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2594616
Camille Freeman, Kiah Smith, Katherine Cullerton
{"title":"From ethical consumers to collective action: advancing healthy and sustainable food systems.","authors":"Camille Freeman, Kiah Smith, Katherine Cullerton","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2594616","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2594616","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A long-standing debate in agrifood sociological work explores how consumer attitudes and behaviours regarding food consumption contribute to healthy food systems. This debate is particularly evident in the study of Alternative Local Food Systems (ALFS), where the potential of 'ethical consumption' to reorient food production-consumption relationships and improve human and ecological health, including food security, remains a subject of ongoing inquiry. Individual consumption from systems of alternative forms of food production (organics, agroecology) and distribution (cooperatives, food hubs) reflect changing consumer values and practices towards sustainable diets. This paper contributes to health sociology by taking a theoretical approach to this debate and drawing on scholarship exploring the relationship between ethical consumption and systems transformation. By examining how different consumption theories (ethical, sustainable, green and political) grapple with the individual-collective dilemma, it offers insights into the determinants of health by demonstrating how ethical consumption, ranging from individual values to collective activism, can influence access to heathy food and ultimately shape health outcomes. It also examines ALFS' contributions to promote collective modes of consumption. This sheds light on how collective agency might prompt deeper food democratic shifts beyond individual consumption, potentially supporting healthy and sustainable diets.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"195-214"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145655942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-07-01Epub Date: 2026-01-22DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2593669
Mia Harrison, Esther Tordjmann, Fiona Haigh, Ilan Katz
{"title":"Navigating health and social care systems: professional tensions, cross-sector effects, and methodological complexities in navigation research and practice.","authors":"Mia Harrison, Esther Tordjmann, Fiona Haigh, Ilan Katz","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2593669","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2593669","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is increasing impetus to help individuals navigate health and social care systems. Though the development and effectiveness of navigator roles have long been explored in health and sociological research, evaluations of navigation are typically narrow in focus and oriented to individual outcomes, quantitative metrics, or barriers and enablers in implementation. Investigating the structural effects of navigation, especially across disparate contexts and sectors, presents significant challenges for researching navigation. To explore these challenges, this article presents a critical interpretive synthesis of qualitative literature on navigation spanning health and social care. Twenty qualitative studies were included, with analysis organised across four themes: (1) <i>modalities of navigation practice</i>; (2) <i>epistemic authority and professional identity</i>; (3) <i>authorising navigation in and through place</i>; (4) <i>situating navigation and its effects in systems</i>. We conceptualise navigation as operating via dual modalities of <i>structural</i> and <i>interpretative</i> practice, and argue this conceptualisation facilitates closer critical attention to the relational and situated practices often obscured in accounts of navigators' work. We also highlight a need for strengthened research designs that reflect the complexities of care systems and consider the effects of navigation across multiple sectors. We finally reflect on emerging challenges posed by digital and algorithmic tools in navigation.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"171-194"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146031262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-01-13DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2608322
Nadia Egalita, Tania Lewis
{"title":"Healthy eating in the platform age: online food delivery and middle-class modernity in Surabaya.","authors":"Nadia Egalita, Tania Lewis","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2608322","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2608322","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Online food delivery platforms (OFPs) are reshaping food consumption across Southeast Asia, with Indonesia at the forefront due in part to its rapidly expanding digital economy. Longstanding public health campaigns such as <i>4 Sehat 5 Sempurna</i> (4 Healthy 5 Perfect) have historically shaped national understandings of nutrition in Indonesia. At the same time, a growing urban middle-class is increasingly adopting globalised lifestyle-oriented concerns around food hygiene, body weight and 'wellness'. The growing use of OFPs by many middle-class households has introduced new tensions between traditional health ideals and convenience-driven digital food practices. Drawing on an ethnographic study of households in Surabaya, this article combines Social Practice Theory (SPT) with the concept of multiple modernities to examine how health, hygiene and food provisioning are negotiated across diverse temporalities, infrastructures, socio-economic contexts and cultural beliefs and practices. It examines how households navigate competing demands of time, taste, intergenerational preferences and trust, while engaging with a diverse provisioning landscape that includes wet markets, local <i>warungs</i> (small family-owned eateries), supermarkets and platform-based food options. By situating these dynamics within Surabaya's layered urban modernities, the article contributes to broader debates about digital food consumption and shifting and emergent health practices in the Global South context.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"8-24"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145967450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-01-22DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2026.2619169
Coral Yu Han
{"title":"The paradox of knowledge and food practices: navigating the tension between healthy eating, nutrition knowledge, and everyday life routines among middle-class consumers in Kunming (China).","authors":"Coral Yu Han","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2619169","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2619169","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper explores the paradox between middle-class consumers' understanding of healthy eating and their actual food practices which often contradict to their knowledge, in the middle-sized Chinese city of Kunming. Based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted across various food consumption settings and in-depth interviews, the study examines how middle-class consumers navigate tensions between aspirations for healthy eating and the realities of modern life. Drawing on social practice theory, it investigates how materialities, competences, and social meanings collectively shape food behaviours, complicating efforts to actualise healthy and sustainable consumption. Unlike international studies suggesting that raising environmental consciousness or promoting health-related knowledge directly leads to sustainable and more nutritional food choices (Hansmann, R., & Binder, C. R. (2020). Determinants of different types of positive environmental behaviors: An analysis of public and private sphere actions. <i>Sustainability</i>, 12(20), 8547; Jaiswal and Aagja, 2024), this research reveals that middle-class consumers in Kunming were equipped with substantial knowledge about healthy diets but struggled to enact these ideals due to competing demands, temporal, and socio-material constraints.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"42-58"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146031215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-03-05DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2026.2625708
Christopher Mayes, Jane Williams, Angie Sassano
{"title":"Normal food practices: negotiating the interaction among norms, practices, and food environments.","authors":"Christopher Mayes, Jane Williams, Angie Sassano","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2625708","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2625708","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines the dynamic interplay between norms, practices, and food environments through the concept of 'normal food practices'. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem's theory of vital norms and social practice theory, we distinguish between descriptive (common), evaluative (proper), and creative (norm-generating) dimensions of food practices. We argue that food-related behaviors are not only shaped by existing norms but also actively produce new ones in response to environmental, technological, and socio-political conditions. We develop three empirical case studies that illustrate how norms are negotiated and transformed: playful resistance to food restrictions in hotel quarantine, decolonial food growing in settler-colonial Australia, and contested norms of purity and care in automated food systems. These examples reveal how food practices mediate agency, belonging, and health, challenging disciplinary models of biopolitical governance. We conclude in arguing that normal food practices are not fixed but are continually enacted and reshaped through everyday actions, offering new possibilities for ethical and political engagement with food.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"74-89"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147366947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-02-12DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2026.2627400
Amy Budrikis, Angela Durey, Dan McAullay, Paul Ward, Hanny Calache, Thierry Ng, Roma Winmar, Linda Slack-Smith
{"title":"Sugar consumption in Aboriginal children explored from a social practice perspective.","authors":"Amy Budrikis, Angela Durey, Dan McAullay, Paul Ward, Hanny Calache, Thierry Ng, Roma Winmar, Linda Slack-Smith","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2627400","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2627400","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Australian Aboriginal children have higher sugar intake and are disproportionately affected by sugar-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and dental caries than non-Aboriginal children. The intention of this paper was to highlight the need for approaches that can capture the complexity of health practices without reducing them to either individual choice or structural determination. We explore sugar consumption in Aboriginal children from a social practice perspective. Here, the unit of analysis is the practice, not the individual, where the elements of a social practice (competence, materials and meanings) are integrated into its performance. We conducted qualitative research using elements of focused ethnography with Aboriginal families in Western Australia to offer an alternative understanding of sugar and Aboriginal children's health. Findings highlight specific practices related to sugar consumption, indicating different social contexts: shopping with children, treats and rewards and family sporting participation. This reflects a complex system of interconnected practices, suggesting more insight is needed to understand the nature and complexity of influences on practices to design more successful policies and interventions. Reframing Aboriginal children's health within a social practice context may assist in mitigating the effects of sugar consumption and offer a different perspective on influencing factors.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"90-104"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146182998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-03-26DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2026.2633748
Caitlan McLean, Kristen Foley
{"title":"Where the wild things are: examining the reflexive affectivity of wilderness on product marketing within industrialised systems.","authors":"Caitlan McLean, Kristen Foley","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2633748","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2633748","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While our relationships with eating and drinking are thought to have undergone a period of disenchantment during industrialisation, some sociologists suggest a re-enchantment is taking hold. This paper explores the reflexive affectivity of wilderness on food and beverage marketing in consideration of persistent cultural tensions such as planetary decline, risk, freedom, and time pressures. Using social practice theories and semiotics, we examined significations of wilderness within a combined dataset of children's snack and alcohol product labels (n = 78). We describe icons and symbols used to portray wilderness, then apply sociological theories to explore the affective commodities these 'wild things' might enable. We suggest wilderness can open reflexive navigation of three affective tensions: (1) domesticated/untamed; (2) romantic/colonial; and (3) nostalgic/convenient. Empirically applying semiotics supported explorations of shared meanings within practices involving eating and drinking. Findings show how reflexive negotiation of affective tensions is shaped by commercial power and sociopolitical conditions within social practices. We suggest meanings of wilderness might sustain specific affects within various social practices, particularly those that balance cultural constructions of responsibility and freedom with the vexed nature of affective resistance to industrial food systems while still being inside them.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"105-127"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147515607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}