Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-01-13DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2608323
Natalie Jovanovski, Lauren Saling, Sharayah Carter
{"title":"Understanding and disrupting nutrition-related (mis)information on social media using Bourdieu's theory of practice.","authors":"Natalie Jovanovski, Lauren Saling, Sharayah Carter","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2608323","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2608323","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The mass migration to social media for nutrition advice has amplified the health risks of false or decontextualised information. Existing countermeasures such as fact-checking, boosting media literacy and behavioural 'nudges' treat the problem as one of cognitive vulnerabilities. Yet everyday interactions with social media, like scrolling, liking and posting, are mostly practices guided by platform design and social rewards. This conceptual paper reframes nutrition-related misinformation (NRM) through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice. We show how the online field of digital food cultures, the capital of likes, follows and sponsorships, and an embodied digital habitus together normalise sensational, influencer-led content while marginalising evidence-based voices. Bringing disparate literatures on NRM, digital food cultures and practice theory into conversation, we map the specific mechanisms that embed misinformation in users' routines - parasocial intimacy, affective storytelling and algorithmic amplification. Recognising practice as the unit of analysis reveals why cognition-focused remedies deliver only modest, context-dependent gains. We propose practice-level interventions that seek to disrupt the field of social media through the voices of resistant health professionals and developing a resistant habitus among users of social media sites.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"25-41"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145967458","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: 2026-01-27DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2026.2620504
Sarah Polkinghorne
{"title":"The dispersed practice of trial and error: understanding adaptation, improvisation and change across food practices.","authors":"Sarah Polkinghorne","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2620504","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2026.2620504","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p><b>ABSTRACT</b>People develop their own ways of enriching the healthiness and tastiness of certain foods, or of their diet, overall. This is often pursued through trial and error, which in this context involves trying, eating, assessing, reflecting, then trying again. Trial and error involves sensory learning, embodied know-how and routinised engagements with information sources such as recipes and social media, as well as with friends and family, and health professionals. Individual instances of trial and error vary, but it is recognisable as a social practice. More specifically, this paper argues that trial and error is a dispersed practice. As such, it supports adaptation, improvisation, insight and information-seeking within other food and health practices. To examine trial and error as a practice, this paper shares findings from a qualitative study of rural and urban Canadians' everyday food lives. The study, through ethnographic techniques such as video tours, explored how people become and stay informed about food. Findings illuminate how trial and error bolsters and connects related food and information practices, and shapes their evolution over time.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"59-73"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146067640","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-05-18DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2504896
Clayton D Thomas, Scott Feyereisen, William R McConnell, Neeraj Puro
{"title":"COVID-19 and nurse practitioner autonomy: a quantitative analysis and analytic narrative of nurse practitioner professionalisation amid physician dominance.","authors":"Clayton D Thomas, Scott Feyereisen, William R McConnell, Neeraj Puro","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2504896","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2504896","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>One understudied aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is the opportunity it provided for nurse practitioners (NPs) to practice autonomously and therefore professionalise. We undertake a quantitative analysis to understand how the pandemic impacted scope of practice laws governing NPs in the United States. We find that NPs were newly granted at least temporary autonomy in 22 US states, and that those policy changes were associated with increasing COVID-19 caseloads. We construct an analytic narrative that situates the COVID-19 pandemic in the larger context of NP professionalisation under physician dominance. We argue that NPs professionalised by achieving small wins of establishing presence, building legitimacy, forming coalitions, and gaining ubiquity between legislation and a pandemic. We use the case of NP professionalisation to build the concept of a professionalisation opportunity structure, which we define as a framework of conditions available for an occupational group to gain autonomy and which consists of periods of small wins punctuated by field-level changes. A professionalisation opportunity structure provides an explanation of professionalisation that transcends intra-occupational dynamics and could be applied to other healthcare occupations seeking to professionalise under physician dominance.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"245-261"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144095374","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-05-29DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2509961
Bo Li
{"title":"Burdening patients: qualitative analysis of healthism in community-based hypertension care in China.","authors":"Bo Li","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2509961","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2509961","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Healthism, a neoliberal ideology that frames health as an individual responsibility and moral duty, inherently operates as a blame-the-victim framework, attributing health outcomes primarily to personal choices and behaviours. This qualitative study critically examines healthism's influence on community-based hypertension care in China, particularly its reinforcement of individualised blame and patient distress. Based on semi-structured interviews with 18 community health professionals and 17 hypertensive patients in Shenzhen, the study reveals that while self-care is promoted as essential to hypertension management, it often fosters feelings of inadequacy and social isolation, particularly among patients struggling to meet the expectations set by healthcare providers. Participants also report emotional distress exacerbated by socio-economic challenges that remain unaddressed within the healthcare system. Moreover, the individualisation of health responsibility erodes trust between patients and providers, as patients internalise failure when unable to adhere to prescribed lifestyle modifications. This study critiques the reductive association between patient autonomy and improved health outcomes, advocating for a more holistic approach to hypertension care that acknowledges broader social determinants of health and prioritises structural support for patient well-being.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"278-294"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144183078","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2565759
Ann Dadich
{"title":"A modest article about brilliant care.","authors":"Ann Dadich","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2565759","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2565759","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While the discourse on care is largely pessimistic, brilliance happens, demonstrated by instances when care exceeded expectation. To advance brilliant care scholarship, this article asks, what are the domains that enable it? Through a reflexive analysis of ten publications on brilliant care, four domains were constructed and justified - namely: a relational orientation to care; attentive engagement; working with and beyond the technical aspects of healthcare; and shared responsibility. This article concludes with an invitation to those who receive, deliver, manage, develop policies that are relevant to, or conduct research on health service management - namely, to consider how these domains can be improved and how they can be systematised and translated into policy and practice, without compromising their dynamic quality.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"360-375"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145214154","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-09-05DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2554072
Rebecca Williamson, Celia Roberts, Louisa Allen, Mary Lou Rasmussen
{"title":"Pregnancy, placentas and smoke exposure: multiple understandings of pregnant embodiment during the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires.","authors":"Rebecca Williamson, Celia Roberts, Louisa Allen, Mary Lou Rasmussen","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2554072","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2554072","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The health implications of prolonged wildfire smoke exposure - such as that seen during the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires - are a major concern in public health, not only in Australia but in many fire-prone areas globally. One group identified as potentially more susceptible to smoke exposure than the general population are pregnant women. Based on a study of how pregnant women and parents with newborn babies experienced the bushfire smoke event in Canberra and the NSW southeast coast, the paper examines how the placenta was figured across two domains during this time. The first domain considers how the placenta became prominent in the context of public and medical concerns about the immediate and long-term impacts of the bushfire smoke, focusing on pregnant women as a 'vulnerable' population. Secondly, we explore how the placenta figured in the narratives of women in our study: how they imagined their bodies responding to smoke exposure and how the smoke made more visible the interiority of their bodies. We argue that these narratives illustrate how environmental crises can reshape experiences of (pregnant) embodiment, imaginaries of future health, and our place in an increasingly uncertain world.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"346-359"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145001641","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-08-26DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2547578
Aikaterini Mentzou, Josephine Ross, Maggie P Ellis, Mia Harrison
{"title":"From 'living death' to 'becoming-with': caring for dementia beyond the human.","authors":"Aikaterini Mentzou, Josephine Ross, Maggie P Ellis, Mia Harrison","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2547578","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2547578","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay provides a critical overview of historical and contemporary conceptualisations of selfhood in dementia. We explore the intersections of psychological and sociological research, as well as care practices, in dementia scholarship and how these have evolved in the years leading to and proceeding the start of the twenty-first century. Focusing on historical discourses of dementia and the metaphor of dementia as a 'living death', this essay maps the development of prominent conceptualisations of dementia in western cultures, from their roots in Cartesian philosophy to modernist values and existential anxieties. We firstly explore historical notions of selfhood in people living with dementia and the presumed erosion of the self that culminates in a so-called living death. Then, we discuss the radical shift in attitudes that arose around the start of the twenty-first century towards perseverance of selfhood in dementia and person-centred care. We finally consider whether our current understanding of selfhood in dementia could benefit from a posthuman approach, which requires a radical shift towards a more relational, multiple, and ultimately affirmative ways of caring for dementia.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"329-345"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973828","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-05-30DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2509941
Hayley Redman, Judith Green, Gill Partington, Des Fitzgerald
{"title":"Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity.","authors":"Hayley Redman, Judith Green, Gill Partington, Des Fitzgerald","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2509941","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2509941","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the UK, a range of everyday activities are being re-framed as interventions to promote public mental health. Drivers of this include the rising burden of mental ill-health and constrained funding for community-based arts and educational provision, in the context of austerity. A consequent interest in evaluating the health and wellbeing benefits of 'non-pharmacological' interventions has brought into play some diverse logics of effect. Taking Creative Bibliotherapy - reading and discussing fiction for therapeutic ends - as a case study, we explore what happens when these logics intersect. Our analysis draws on qualitative data on how reading is understood as therapy by those involved in one area of the UK. In accounting for what it was and how it worked, these actors negotiated a series of tensions in advocating for bibliotherapy. These included: reading is inherently worthy, but has instrumental benefits; reading is universally therapeutic, yet implicated in signalling social distinction; Bibliotherapy demands a widened vision of the 'therapeutic', yet resists medicalisation. These ambiguities, we suggest, means that Creative Bibliotherapy troubles biomedicine, in foregrounding its limitations for addressing contemporary public mental health crises, and the paucity of its dominant models of therapeutic effect.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"262-277"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144188270","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-06-25DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2518997
Michael Rabi, Limor Samimian-Darash, Stefan Elbe, Eva Hilberg
{"title":"The contemporary (re-)configuration of global health governance: reevaluating health politics in the COVID-19 pandemic.","authors":"Michael Rabi, Limor Samimian-Darash, Stefan Elbe, Eva Hilberg","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2518997","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2518997","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic has raised probing questions about the politics that underly health governance. This article engages with recent sociological and political analyses in this regard and offers a reconsideration of what the pandemic represents for global health governance: a moment of reconfiguration rather than continuity or fundamental change. Drawing on Paul Rabinow's notion of 'the contemporary' as a mode of analysis, we conceptualise global health governance as a 'contemporary configuration' and analyse publicly available data from sources documenting the international response to COVID-19. We identify the appearance of a specific kind of problematisation of solidarity in the light of perceived disarray and fragmentation in global health governance. A perception related to the dynamics that evolved in the international political system during the emergency. Further, we discern processes of remediation in global health governance that unfolded around that problematisation of solidarity. We argue that global health governance, as it emerged in the COVID-19 emergency, should not simply be understood as bounded by the past nor as dramatically altered in the present. Instead, it had undergone a reconfiguration wherein solidarity may potentially become the crux of its politics.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"295-311"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144498359","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 : 2025-11-01Epub Date: 2025-09-25DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2547576
Dana Zarhin
{"title":"<i>Sleepscapes</i>: rhythms, routines, and the dynamics of everyday and everynight life.","authors":"Dana Zarhin","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2547576","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2547576","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Sociologists are increasingly interested in exploring the role of time in relation to illness, disability, and care. However, the question of how individuals experience and navigate the temporal dimensions of sleep in their everyday and everynight lives requires further empirical research. The present study addresses this question using in-depth semi-structured interviews with 66 employed midlife Israelis from diverse sociodemographic backgrounds. The findings indicate that sleep experiences are shaped by a complex interplay of biological, social, and seasonal rhythms. Sleep patterns recur nightly, weekly, seasonally, and following major life events and transitions, combining to create what I call <i>sleepscapes</i> - the evolving rhythmic patterns and disruptions that characterise the lived dynamics of sleep throughout a person's lifecourse. The study underscores the concept of polyrhythmia - multiple rhythms - in everyday and everynight life and shows how various rhythms can either harmonise or clash, often co-producing each other. The study explores individuals' efforts to negotiate these rhythms, illustrating how all these processes profoundly impact human experiences, social relationships, and health.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"312-328"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145138853","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}