Somatosphere welcomes you to the July edition of “In the Journals.” Scroll through our monthly round up of new research across anthropology, STS and social science journals.
Out of Time? Chronocracy and Ageism in Brexit–COVID-19 England
Cathrine Degnen
Generation or relative age is a common way humans define social difference. In Europe and North America, old age is frequently perceived as a period of decline and loss, a condition “successful aging” paradigms exhort individuals to avoid for as long as possible. Explicit and implicit ageist beliefs, discourses, and practices marginalize later life, portraying it as undesirable and inferior. This essay explores how imagined generational relationships with time—younger people as future facing, older people as out of time—enrol linear, future-oriented temporal perspectives in reproducing ageism. The aftermath of the Brexit referendum, followed closely by the COVID-19 pandemic, serve as my ethnographic examples. These two extraordinary events permit me to highlight how chronocracy (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020)—that is, the denial of coevalness or coexistence in time through everyday temporal regimes—reinforces unequal power dynamics, and to explore how generational groups are differently valued in contemporary England.
Act Blur, Live Longer: Muslim Artists Blurring the Categories of Singapore’s Smart City
James McGrail
In 2024, Singapore was again named “Smartest City in Asia,” a position achieved through the strategic deployment of surveillance infrastructures and technocratic governance. This article explores the practices of three Muslim artists whose work challenges the limiting categorizations produced by the intertwined logics of Smart Nation governance and state racialization. Based on fieldwork conducted since 2022, I argue that by offering their work plausible deniability through the strategy of “blurring,” these artists operate in the highly surveilled context of Singapore by being unclear publicly. This not just marks a strategy of evasion. By engaging with the anthropologies of Islam and surveillance, I argue that these artworks disrupt established categories, revealing the inherent complexities of identity obscured by technological efficiency and racial categories. Through these works, which go beyond the visible, these artists create space to imagine something otherwise by complicating the neat categorization of the Singapore state.
Poisonous Images: Taranto’s Environmental Crisis between the Visible and the Invisible
Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia
This article explores poisonous images—images that both register and trouble the visibility of toxicity in Taranto, Italy, one of Europe’s most polluted cities due to the continent’s largest steel factory. Centered on photographs taken in the city’s contaminated cemetery, the essay asks how slow violence can be apprehended ethnographically when pollution remains unevenly perceptible and causally elusive. I argue that the photographic image, beyond its forensic or legal promise, functions as an ethnographic hinge between matter and meaning, visibility and refusal, foregrounding aesthetics as a political as much as a sensory problem. Through three photographic acts produced by cemetery workers, a local performance artist, and myself (as anthropologist), the article proposes “flickering” as an anthropological method—attuned to the intermittence between visible/invisible, absence/presence, and the oscillation of death in everyday life. These poisonous images do not stabilize evidence: they pulse in and out of consciousness, capturing uncertainty and unequally distributed exposures and sensibilities. The cemetery emerges as both site and figure for grasping the metamorphosis of death amid the environmental crisis, where mourning and inheritance remain perpetually unsettled.
The Traffic in Repairmen and a Case of Gender Impropriety in Post-War Sarajevo
Halide Velioğlu
In postwar Sarajevo, repair is mainly a masculine activity, and people lean on communal networks to get things fixed under dire economic circumstances. Yet increased numbers of women without men in their households as an effect of the war necessitate the mediation of other women in facilitating access to men’s labor. Women of social capital who have access to men gain prestige by proffering male repair services. Examining the case of a gender-nonconforming woman provides rich insight into the pivotal role that “gender propriety” plays in establishing systems of daily care, normalcy, and social order in Bosnia. The mundane gendered work of repairing broken things ultimately depends on cultivating, sustaining, and sometimes recalibrating relationships among women.
“To hell with symbols!”: Men, Pigeons, and the Violence of Interpretation
Robbie Peters
This article examines men who race pigeons in the back alleys of an Indonesian neighborhood amid government crackdowns on gambling. It introduces the equivocal pigeon: a bird these men present as a-symbolic, or incapable of saying things for or about them. The equivocal pigeon is an intellectually provocative animal that upsets commonsense ideas about birds and men and meaning and turns the city inside out by bringing its back alleys into view but not into understanding. The article shows how racing pigeons achieve this feat by drawing men into busy alleys while shrouding them in a thicket of opaque interactions. It views the city from its alleys, where the pigeon confounds postcolonial ways of knowing and governing people. Building on Javanese ways of not knowing, it shows how the pigeon is a meaning-defying animal that protects men from what they call the violence of interpretation (kekerasan interpretasi).
Wounds in Utopia: The Politics of Gay Football in 4T Mexico
Max D. López Toledano
LGBT+ football teams have proliferated in Mexico in recent years, allowing communities who previously struggled with feeling at the margins of the nation to make new claims to respectability and national belonging. At the same time, these have developed surprising alliances with political parties, blurring in some cases the relationships of partisan representation that Mexican electoral politics are built on. These patterns, I contend, have been largely enabled by the sociopolitical transformations of Mexico’s 4T movement, which has instilled a climate of change surrounding cultural hierarchies of gender and sexuality. In this context, emergent fractures within queer groups have shed light on the contradictions of “Mexican humanism,” Mexico’s newly coined political philosophy. Exhibiting the characteristics of a human security regime, Mexico’s 4T acts as backdrop to a broader array of political paradoxes that accompany the country’s gay football scene—a space of “wounds in utopia,” where wounds, healing, and violence may all coexist.
Peter Lockwood
North of Nairobi, the city’s sprawl enters a landscape of impoverished smallholders, causing land prices to skyrocket. Kenya’s economic commentators urge these part-time proletarians to sell their land—deemed unproductive “dead capital”—as an antidote for rural poverty. Senior men from the region insist this ancestral land cannot be sold, because retaining it while working for wages constitutes the cornerstone of masculine personhood. However, in a world of peri-urban destitution, where wages cannot provision desires for middle-class lifestyles, masculine principles of land retention are being abandoned for experiences of abandon. Male landowners alienate family land to fund lifestyles of conspicuous consumption, especially in alcohol. The consumption of dead capital to furnish desires of abandon suggests that Nairobi’s urban expansion is made possible by such binge economies of land on its peri-urban peripheries. The conclusion proposes consumption as a theory of changing moral orientations to the short term when people encounter economic dead ends.
Hierarchical Precarity: Dance Hosting, Labor Struggles, and Masculine Insecurities in China
Juan Chen
Young Chinese male migrant workers partner with middle-aged women in dance halls, and sell intimacy and romantic relationships in everyday locations as “dance hosts.” Dance hosts experience considerable job precarity and masculine insecurities. While frequently expressing a desire to leave, most hosts remain in the profession and perpetuate their precarious existence. This article explores the relationship between precarity as a labor condition and precarity as an ontological experience among dance hosts. I argue that while precarious labor may stabilize daily living, it also causes new insecurities that destabilize people’s lives. This article theorizes the concept of hierarchical precarity to explain labor motivation and suggests that the decision to engage in precarious labor hinges on its capacity to address one’s most pressing insecurities, outweighing the additional precarity it creates. I conclude by highlighting how gender relates to different forms of labor struggle and workers’ agency in navigating the hierarchically ranked precarity and masculinities.
Yue Liao
This article examines how middle-aged Chinese farmers navigate their position between a highly mobile new urban elite and the traditionally immobile elderly peasantry through a set of practices I term inter-mobility. Based on ethnographic research in Huanglu village, I explore how their adoption of new greenhouse technologies is shaped by both the shifting political-economic landscape of post-socialist China and their desire to align kin-based solidarities with emerging values of progress. I argue that these farmers use greenhouse farming to cultivate a strategic, in-between position, distinguishing themselves from the perceived stasis of the older generation while upholding familial commitments, unlike the perceived rootlessness of younger urban entrepreneurs. This inter-mobility is animated by an ethos of yongxin, which frames their entrepreneurial risk-taking as a form of intergenerational care. The study highlights how China’s broader societal transformations generate not just new agricultural technologies but also new subjectivities within its stratified mobility regimes.
Recalling the Suicide: Affective Storytelling and the Ethics of “Good” Womanhood
Anjali Krishan
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Delhi, this article examines middle-class married women’s stories about the suicides of their female neighbors. Paying attention to “what moves” women emotionally and “what matters” to them in recounting their stories of life and willful death, these stories are ethical commentaries on what constitutes “good” womanhood, specifically “Hindu” womanhood. Anthropological scholarship in South Asia has established that supposedly good womanhood hinges on how successful middle-class women are in pursuing a modern, globalized “good life” while being rooted in traditional, predominantly Hindu, cultural norms and values. This analysis of suicide storytelling demonstrates that women are not passive subjects of this binary; instead, they actively adjudicate the ethical validity of mainstream constructs of good Hindu womanhood, in the process questioning middle-class understandings of what constitutes a life worth living and whose suffering matters. Such ethical questioning allows the narrators to make political claims for recognition and rights while performing a subtle critique of the prevailing gender politics within Modi’s India.
Rust and Reparations: Memory, Labor, and the Politics of Repair in Senegal’s Railway Workshop
Charline Kopf
This essay examines the multivalences of repair in Senegalese railway workshops, where workers maintain and modify aging wagons from suburban and former transnational rail services, originally imported from France, and later from India and Pakistan. I trace three interrelated dimensions of repair. First, I show how repair operates as both replacement and improvisation, challenging the assumption that maintenance necessarily counteracts decay; instead, it can accelerate deterioration. Second, I analyze repair as reappropriation, focusing on workers’ “tropicalization” of foreign technologies to fit local conditions. Finally, I explore how the inevitability of failure, stemming from the machines’ inherent faults, demands creative mending and continuous perseverance. These practices generate not only new objects assembled from scrap but also narratives of West African railway workers whose engineering contributions have long been marginalized in colonial and postcolonial histories. Material patching thus becomes an act of reparation, asserting technical authorship and forging alternative histories of infrastructure, labor, and expertise.
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Erika Szymanski, Koichi Mikami & Jane Calvert
We have written the introduction to this special issue on responsible research and innovation (RRI) in the UK and Japan as a visitor’s guide to an imaginary island holiday park to emphasize how we have centered the situatedness of practices that contribute to responsibility in science and technology. Our overarching argument is that RRI cannot be discussed as a program without foregrounding its location, and that RRI therefore needs “alternative practices”—heuristics that inspire adaptation in context—above “best practices” that might be exported from historic centers of investment to historically marginalized peripheries. We have also gravitated to experiment and play as strategies to find more space for intellectually rich, personally satisfying, and collectively enjoyable work amid pressures for STS researchers to take on rote service work under RRI mandates. We welcome you to the place—トピアtopia—that our collaboration has built and invite you to travel with us through the alternative practices we have sketched out here.
Histories of Scientific Responsibility in Japan and the United Kingdom
Yuko Fujigaki, Ryuma Shineha, Robert D. J. Smith & Steve Sturdy
We historicize talk of social responsibility in relation to science and technology. By charting the multiple and contested notions of responsibility that scientists have espoused from the early twentieth century to the present, we show how scientists have used the word strategically, at different times and in different contexts, to project their preferred views of how science should relate to wider society. Comparing Japan and the UK enables us to highlight both the context-specific meanings that scientists have associated with responsibility, and the way that such meanings have come into conversation with one another. By so doing, it also helps us think about the purpose and implications of current and emerging configurations of “responsible” research and innovation—including how those configurations may shield scientists from certain kinds of responsibility while embracing others.
Koichi Mikami, Erika Szymanski, Jusaku Minari, Robert Smith & Niki Vermeulen
This paper juxtaposes major historical developments in public engagement in Japan and the UK to unsettle the idea that the UK experience of how “publics” have been accounted for in science policy might be taken as a common or representative story. In comparison to the UK and European moves “from deficit to dialogue,” recent events in Japan are much less well-known internationally, and do not follow the same pattern. Rather than being either “ahead” or “behind,” Japan’s experience has connected similar concepts or approaches in different ways. We highlight these contrasts to challenge and open up dominant Western narratives, to create space for considering how movements for public engagement with science—or what has been called “the participatory turn”—may unfold in different ways across different contexts. Simultaneously, we point to idiosyncrasies in the UK experience that may not always be observed as such. In so doing, we demonstrate that connections—or, as it may be, the absence of connections—between public engagement, science policy, and social responsibility cannot be taken for granted and must be addressed in specific contexts.
Arisa Ema & Jane Calvert
Researchers in science and technology studies (STS) are increasingly being called upon to contribute to research programs in the natural sciences and engineering, often under the heading of ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI), or more recently, responsible research and innovation (RRI). There has been little work to date that compares these experiences across countries and contexts. In this paper, we present two accounts of STS involvement—in artificial intelligence in Japan and synthetic biology in the UK. Although we work in two different technoscientific fields in two different countries, similarities emerge. Our accounts both show the importance of long-term, low-stakes collaborations, built up organically over time—collaborations that trouble the distinction between being either an “insider” or an “outsider” to a technoscientific field. We argue that RRI is more likely to be expansive and imaginative if it is done in the context of such collaborations, and that it is important for research funders to cultivate the conditions that make them possible. We end by calling for more tales from STS researchers of their experiences of RRI and ELSI across countries and contexts, to provide tools and resources for future collaborative work.
The Soba Restaurant and the Oyster Bar: Peripheral Spaces for Responsible Research and Innovation
Robert Smith, Ken Kawamura, Erika Szymanski, Ryuma Shineha & Jane Calvert
As STS researchers working closely with scientists and engineers, we have been invited into, created, reluctantly entered, and stumbled upon many kinds of spaces, some of which might be considered spaces for responsible research and innovation. Here we discuss a selection of these spaces, drawing on our work in synthetic biology in the UK and molecular robotics in Japan. They include a multidisciplinary workshop, a public engagement event, an art performance, and several panels at scientific conferences on the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by our fields of study. Many of the spaces were owned and controlled by scientists and engineers, and our participation in them was constrained by pre-existing frames. But even in those spaces we designed ourselves it was difficult to challenge institutionalized practices and dominant understandings of the relationship between the natural and social sciences. We often found that those places that were most conducive to provocative, productive and critical cross-disciplinary dialogue were at the peripheries of formal events. We explore the importance of peripheral spaces for RRI, drawing on the examples of interactions that took place at a soba restaurant and an oyster bar.
Informal, Institutional and Interdependent Openings for Responsible Research and Innovation
Sujatha Raman & Dan Santos
Cross-cultural comparisons generate valuable insights about how the social sciences can shape technoscientific domains and trajectories. In this Special Issue Commentary, we reflect on the rich insights contained in the articles exploring social scientific experiences with responsible research and innovation (RRI) in Japan and the UK, and organize our reflections around three types of opening for thinking about and approaching RRI going forward. First, we affirm the importance of exploring informal spaces for cultivating RRI, especially for consolidating connections and opening up opportunities. Secondly, and relatedly, we argue that possibilities for informality are intertwined with the institutional (e.g. projects, practices, norms), and much can be learned from comparing different experiences at this nexus. Finally, we draw attention to the productive potential of investigating interdependencies for enabling novel ways of approaching RRI, with respect to both forging collaborations between social and biophysical researchers, and in framing and undertaking public engagement initiatives.
Ethos
Charisma revisited: Or why narcissism matters
Jeff Bennett
In 1990 Charles Lindholm published his landmark study of Charisma, shedding new light on a complex and controversial topic. Today, more than 30 years later, understanding charisma has become newly important as authoritarian leaders and populist politics have begun to reshape the global political landscape. This paper returns to Lindholm’s original study to address the two phenomena Lindholm felt were most important – namely, the personality configurations of charismatic leaders and their followers and group psychodynamics. Unlike Lindholm, however, I approach these phenomena from the vantage point of intersubjective self psychology, a post-Freudian theoretical framework that is particularly well-suited for analyzing the popular appeal of figures like Jim Jones and the group dynamics that bonded the members of the People’s Temple to the movement. To make this point, Lindholm’s original case studies are referenced throughout the paper and a distinction between destructive and reparative leadership is made to highlight the difference between ‘leading’ and ‘trailing’ edge orientations as they pertain to charismatic leaders and their movements.
Can a lizard ride on a housefly?: Navigating uncertainty and moral life in an Accra Zongo, Ghana
Emily A. Williamson
How can uncertainty become a resource for ethical life rather than a threat to it? Focusing on a Zongo community in Accra, Ghana—also known as a “traveler’s camp” or “stranger’s quarters”—this article examines how people use a creative form of communication called the practice of folding to sustain relationships shaped by conditions of uncertainty. I define this practice as a form of indirect communication that brings together opposing ideas, materialities, and geographies that are not typically associated with one another. Contributing to literature at the intersection of uncertainty, language, and morality, I argue that the practice of folding cultivates and sustains intersubjective uncertainty, inviting participants to keep doubt, questioning, and possibilities in active tension. It enables a particular form of ethical attunement I term an ethics of traveling-with—an obligation to continually shift perspectives in order to understand other points of view, thereby delaying or even refusing resolution. These findings offer new insights into moral life in contexts of fragility, improvisation, and interdependence, challenging the common assumption that moral striving necessarily seeks resolution, judgment, or evaluation.
Divine intimacy, frustration and the madness of the city: Changing transhuman kinship in China
Keping Wu & Robert P. Weller
This essay shows the affective resonances of the collision of gods, humans, and rapidly shifting landscapes in a newly urbanized part of Suzhou, China. The first section discusses how ties to spirits are not just metaphors or projections of human kinship, but literal parts of a kinship system that invoke responsibilities of care, based on links of both affect and blood. The second turns to how such intimacy is not always pleasant, and how the closest relationships to gods often begin with sickness and suffering, and in some cases with death leading to deification. Examples of these intimacies include Amei’s painful calling to be a spirit medium (and thus a god’s daughter) and her niece Xiangling’s death and deification as the concubine of the god who took her. The last section turns to the rapid urbanization of the area over the past two decades, which has destroyed all the local temples along with the villages they served. This dis-placement has created a new affect of frustration in the daughters of the gods, due to the interruptions of their responsibilities of care. In the case of Xiangling’s mother, the frustration spiraled into madness after the urbanization process destroyed the statue of her deified daughter. Integrating Navaro-Yashin’s analysis of spaces of ruin with insights from scholars working on the emotional tensions built into intimacy, we reveal how the dis-placements of rapid urbanization have transformed those intimacies to create an affective and embodied ruination.
Thomas Stodulka, Anni Kajanus, Suzana Jovicic
This commentary reflects on the contemporary trajectories and futures of psychological anthropology through the metaphor of a “sea of anchors.” Rather than reproducing binaries of center and margin, we conceptualize “anchors” as temporary and dynamic points of orientation through which theories, methods, collaborations, and infrastructures condense and circulate unevenly across regions and disciplines. Building on contributions to the 2026 Ethos virtual issue, we argue for more decentralized, accessible, and collaborative forms of psychological anthropology that move beyond disciplinary silos while remaining attentive to enduring asymmetries in global knowledge production. We examine how psychological anthropologists navigate critical and often marginal positions between anthropology, psychology, and related fields, and how this intermediary position enables productive forms of interdisciplinary mediation, critique, and collaboration. At the same time, we emphasize that decolonizing psychological anthropology requires more than theoretical critique alone: it demands transformations in citation practices, research infrastructures, collaboration, and institutional accessibility. Contemporary psychological anthropology, we suggest, is uniquely positioned to engage constructively with both the humanities and sciences while critically interrogating universalizing psychologies, extractive epistemologies, and emerging global inequalities. By advocating for a plurality of interconnected “anchors,” we envision psychological anthropology as a politically engaged, empirically grounded, and globally collaborative field capable of fostering alternative forms of scholarly exchange and future-oriented anthropological practice.
International Journal of Social Psychiatry
Why Should We Revive Narrative Psychiatry in the Shadowy Times of Artificial Intelligence? And How?
Dinesh Bhugra, Fabiana Ricci and Antonio Ventriglio
Narrative psychiatry is dead… is it really? Can it be revived in the present era, in which growing enthusiasm for the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare is shifting the focus towards symptom checklists and algorithmic approaches? On the one hand, AI is expected to facilitate clinical work and enhance efficiency for many clinicians and healthcare professionals; on the other, its rapid integration may generate substantial challenges for certain medical specialities.
Medicine is grounded in the principle of primum non nocere (Anon, 2008). As Trudeau in the 19th century famously observed, the role of the physician is ‘to cure sometimes, to relieve often, and to comfort always’ (as cited in Siegel, 2018). However, with medical and surgical advances emerging at an unprecedented rate, clinical attention has increasingly shifted towards interventions and investigations, a trend further reinforced by the growing adoption of AI, which tends to privilege symptom-focused and algorithm-driven approaches. Have we lost the art of medicine? Have the traditional aims of medicine gradually given way to an imperative to cure always? Similarly, has the principle of relieving often been replaced by an expectation to relieve always? Some of these shifts reflect genuine advances in our understanding of the brain and body, while others arise from the changing social expectations and transformations in societal structures. The social contract between medicine, particularly psychiatry, patients, their carers and society at large remains a fundamental yet frequently neglected dimension of clinical practice (Lidz et al., 1988). Healthcare professionals and policymakers must ensure that this contract is grounded in shared understanding and explicitly negotiated expectations.
Involving International Experts in DSM-6: A Geopsychiatric Approach
Neil Krishan Aggarwal, Antonio Ventriglio, Dinesh Bhugra, and Albert Persaud
In January 2026, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced its intention to involve international experts for the sixth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, tentatively titled DSM-6. Oquendo et al. (2026), writing on behalf of the Future DSM Steering Committee, emphasized that because expert consensus on the interpretation of available data remains the guiding model of the DSM, careful consideration must be given to who is designated as an expert shaping its future direction. They argued that this is essential to ensure the integration of more globally inclusive epistemologies and scientific approaches. In the same article, Oquendo et al. (2026) further maintained that adopting a cultural lens enables the decentering of Western epistemologies and fosters the incorporation of more inclusive, globally informed perspectives, thereby strengthening the cross-cultural validity of DSM diagnostic criteria. Consistent with this objective, Wainberg et al. (2026) reported that the Future DSM Socioeconomic, Cultural, and Environmental Determinants of Mental Health Subcommittee has invited global experts to present on current knowledge and to delineate future directions. Concurrently, Oquendo et al. (2026) cautioned that any modifications to diagnostic criteria or codes must be implemented in a manner that preserves global clinical utility and avoids unintended adverse consequences for patient care. These writings raise questions about the engagement of international experts with DSM-6 committees, how globally inclusive this process will be, and the extent to which their recommendations will be implemented. In this paper, we advocate that the interdisciplinary orientation of Geopsychiatry offers practical guidance to integrate global epistemologies and scientific approaches in DSM-6.
Phoebe M. Downey, Jack C. Collins, Sarira El-Den, and Claire L. O’Reilly
Background:
The use of psychotropic medications in children and adolescents is increasing worldwide. However, caregivers’ perspectives regarding the use of these medications in young people remain underexplored.
Aims:
To explore caregivers’ perspectives towards the use of psychotropic medications in the treatment of mental disorders in young people.
Method:
A systematic search was conducted across five databases (MEDLINE (ALL), Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Scopus) using a search strategy encompassing the concepts ‘psychotropic medications’, ‘mental health’, ‘attitudes’, ‘young people’, and ‘caregivers’ to identify relevant records published up to 25 March 2024. Records were screened by title and abstract against predefined criteria, followed by full-text review. Data were synthesised and presented in tables. Quality assessment was conducted using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool.
Results:
After screening 1,296 records, 17 studies were eligible for inclusion. Findings were categorised into caregiver attitudes (n = 12), experiences (n = 2), and preferences (n = 9) regarding the use of psychotropic medications in young people. Most caregivers reported negative attitudes, with scepticism, fears of adverse effects and addiction, and doubts regarding efficacy commonly mentioned, including in those whose children had experience with psychotropic medication. Some caregivers were open to the use of psychotropic medications in their children if it was deemed necessary, however, psychotherapy was overwhelmingly the preferred treatment modality. The methodological quality of included studies was mixed; while many met criteria for appropriate sampling and analysis, few used validated measures, and high risk of bias due to non-response and reporting limitations was common.
Conclusion:
This review emphasises the importance of acknowledging and addressing caregiver concerns and actively involving them in the decision-making process. The substantial heterogeneity in study designs, measures, and participant characteristics reinforces the need for future research to employ validated instruments alongside both qualitative and interventional approaches to capture caregiver perspectives and the contextual factors that shape them.
Making a Home for Individuals With Serious Mental Illness: A Systematic Review
Emi Patmisari, Yunong Huang, Ros Wong, Mark Orr, Sumathi Govindasamy, Emily Hielscher, and Helen McLaren
Background:
Housing is widely recognised as a key social determinant of mental health and recovery, yet the concept of home remains under-theorised and inconsistently applied in practice and policy.
Aims:
The aim of this systematic review is to examine home for people with serious mental illness (SMI), focussing on various stakeholder perspectives reported in literature.
Methods:
Records from CINAHL, Emcare, ProQuest, PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (n = 5,309) were double screened, resulting in 26 peer-reviewed studies for inclusion. Thematic analysis identified fifteen themes synthesised according to perspectives of four different populations: individuals with SMI; their family members; landlords; staff; and sector experts.
Results:
Contrary to a house, home was described as shaped by emotional safety, personal control, daily routines, and the quality of social relationships. Findings underscored the need for relational, flexible, and context-sensitive housing approaches that support autonomy, continuity, and belonging.
Conclusions:
This review contributes to a more nuanced understanding of home as a multi-dimensional and negotiated concept, from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, with implications for mental health policy, service design, and future research.
Evaluation of Parents’ Self-Compassion Levels and Parenting Styles
Sema Sal and Mükerrem Kabataş Yıldız
Background:
Parenting plays a critical role not only in supporting children’s healthy growth and development but also in contributing to a meaningful and fulfilling life.
Aims:
This study evaluates how parents’ self-compassion levels, which significantly influence their well-being, affect their parenting styles.
Methods:
The research was conducted using a cross-sectional and descriptive design. Data were collected through an online form between April and October 2024, using a general information form, the Self-Compassion Scale, and the Multidimensional Parenting Styles Scale. Data analyses were performed using SPSS 25.0. Descriptive statistics, including mean, standard deviation, minimum/maximum values, frequency, and percentage, were used to summarize the findings.
Results:
The effect of parents’ self-compassion levels on parenting styles was analyzed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results indicate that most parents exhibit high levels of self-compassion and positive parenting behaviors. Additionally, as self-compassion levels decrease, negative parenting behaviors tend to increase.
Conclusion:
These findings suggest that self-compassion is a key factor in the parenting process, and supporting parents’ self-compassion levels may contribute to developing more positive parenting behaviors. Therefore, it is recommended that psychosocial support and awareness programs be developed to enhance parents’ self-compassion levels.
Martin Wolgast, Katarina Fredriksson Tham, Maja Straht, and Henrik Levinsson
Background:
Mental health professionals often differ in their explanatory models of mental distress, which may influence their attitudes toward individuals experiencing such conditions. Stigmatizing attitudes among providers can adversely affect therapeutic relationships, service quality, and recovery outcomes.
Aims:
This study investigates the attributional frameworks—biological, cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, and social-realist—endorsed by psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers in Swedish adult psychiatry. It further examines how these explanatory preferences are associated with stigmatizing attitudes toward individuals with mental distress.
Method:
A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 715 licensed psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. Attributional orientations were measured using a revised version of the Maudsley Attitude Questionnaire (MAQ-R), and stigma was assessed with the revised Opening Minds Stigma Scale for Health Care Providers (OMS-HC-R). Group differences were analyzed using General Linear Models, and associations between attributional frameworks and stigma were explored through linear regression. Given the cross-sectional design, causal inferences cannot be drawn from the observed associations.
Results:
Psychiatrists reported significantly stronger endorsement of biological attributions compared to psychologists and social workers, while psychologists favored cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic explanations. Social workers exhibited the strongest preference for social-realist attributions. Endorsement of biological and cognitive-behavioral models was positively associated with higher stigma scores, although these associations may reflect broader occupational or systemic influences. In contrast, social-realist attributions were associated with lower stigma. Psychodynamic attributions showed no significant association.
Conclusions:
Differences in attributional frameworks among mental health professionals are associated with variation in reported stigmatizing attitudes. These findings underscore the importance of addressing explanatory diversity in interdisciplinary training and suggest that nuanced understandings of etiology may inform stigma-reduction efforts. Future research should explore the role of contextual and institutional factors, as well as potential confounders, in shaping these relationships.
Empowering Gen Z’s Mental Health in a Hyperconnected World
Dani Fadillah and Bai Long
Background:
Generation Z faces unprecedented mental health challenges in a hyperconnected digital environment. While technology offers benefits such as access to resources and support networks, it also poses risks including anxiety, depression, and social comparison. Comprehensive studies integrating diverse methods to examine these challenges remain limited.
Aims:
This study investigates the intersection of digital engagement and psychological well-being among Generation Z, with a focus on identifying risks and exploring proactive strategies for resilience.
Methods:
A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining (1) bibliometric analysis of 1,103 Scopus-indexed publications (2020–2024) using VOSviewer, (2) qualitative content analysis of 500 social media posts across TikTok, Twitter/X, and Instagram, and (3) semi-structured interviews with eight experts in psychiatry, psychology, and digital education. Data were triangulated to enhance validity.
Results:
The bibliometric analysis revealed three dominant research clusters centered on psychopathology, resilience and public health, and developmental/family-oriented perspectives. Social media discourse emphasized risk narratives, self-presentation pressures, peer support, and digital detox practices. Expert interviews highlighted rising clinical risks, identity strain, untapped peer support, and gaps in policy and education. Triangulated findings show convergence on risks, but also divergence where lived experiences and expert perspectives foreground coping strategies and resilience overlooked in the academic literature.
Conclusions:
Hyperconnectivity functions as both a stressor and a source of resilience for Gen Z. A multidimensional approach involving individuals, educators, policymakers, and digital platforms is necessary to promote digital well-being and strengthen youth mental resilience in the hyperconnected world.
Julio Torales, Marcelo O’Higgins, Beatriz Di Martino, Diana Kunihiro, Liz Carbajal, Fabiana Pereira, Enrique Franco, Anthon Daniel Torres-Romero, Antonio Ventriglio, João Mauricio Castaldelli-Maia, Tomás Caycho-Rodríguez, and Iván Barrios
Background:
Psychiatric discharge summaries are vital for ensuring continuity of care, yet they are often written in technical language that can be difficult for patients to understand and may cause emotional distress or reinforce stigma. With increasing patient access to medical records, there is a pressing need to develop communication tools that are both comprehensible and emotionally safe.
Aim:
This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic fidelity, linguistic clarity, emotional sensitivity, treatment comprehension, and readability of psychiatric discharge summaries rewritten by ChatGPT-4 based on real clinical cases.
Methods:
This was the first study in South America to examine the use of a generative language model for rewriting psychiatric discharge summaries. A mixed-methods, observational cross-sectional design was applied. Twenty-five anonymized clinical cases were rewritten using ChatGPT-4. Three psychiatrists independently assessed each AI-generated summary across four dimensions: diagnostic fidelity, clarity of language, perceived emotional risk, and understanding of treatment. Readability was evaluated using the Fernández-Huerta Index and the INFLESZ Scale. A thematic analysis of evaluators’ written comments was also conducted.
Results:
Summaries generated by ChatGPT-4 were rated positively, particularly for clarity and treatment explanation. Significant improvements in readability were observed across all diagnostic groups (p
Conclusions:
ChatGPT-4 can enhance the accessibility and emotional appropriateness of psychiatric discharge communication, supporting more patient-centered care. Nevertheless, professional oversight remains critical to ensure clinical accuracy and contextual sensitivity. Future research should include patient feedback, assess long-term outcomes, and explore hybrid human-AI collaboration models.
Journal of Critical Public Health
Bait and switches in academic publishing
Kirsten Bell
In this editorial, I would like to reflect on the phenomenon I am calling here ‘bait and switches’ in academic publishing. Rather than representing an anomaly, I want to suggest that it’s simply business as usual for corporate publishers. While few are in the position to be able to substitute a lower-tiered open access journal for a higher ranked subscription one, they have realised – or, at the very least, assumed – that branding is all that matters to academics.
Hannah Newman, Louca-Mai Brady, Elspeth Mathie, Kathryn Almack & Wendy Wills
There is growing interest in whole systems-based approaches to obesity, yet little understanding about how these can be achieved or about the tensions inherent in navigating the social, emotional, and behavioural issues within behaviour change interventions. We were commissioned to evaluate a programme of place-based, whole-systems approaches to tackling obesity and health inequalities for adults, children and families in areas with higher-than-average obesity rates and socioeconomic deprivation. Underpinned by an embedded ethnography approach, this process evaluation explored how best to engage diverse communities in service delivery and development using evidence-informed approaches, and whether services can be co-produced with communities and people with lived experience. Our approach combined: focus groups and interviews with staff, service users, commissioners and other external partners (n=64); participant observation; membership of a Strategic Oversight Group; and qualitative research training for staff. This unique project demonstrates factors important for shaping a whole systems approach, including the value and challenges of community engagement, and the limitations caused by how services are commissioned. Consideration is needed regarding how systems and structures can facilitate or create barriers to ‘embedded’ research and the implementation of whole systems approaches, involvement and co-production, and take account of wider determinants of health and inequalities.
Continuity of biopolitics in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia: What policy documents can tell us
Olga Temina , Olga Zvonareva & Klasien Horstman
From a critical public health perspective, public health serves as an instrument of biopolitics in modern societies. Through public health measures, citizens’ bodies are regularised to exhibit desirable characteristics. However, what is considered desirable differs between epochs and political configurations. In this article we aimed to discern what kinds of subjects were envisioned as ideal and what configurations of public health were consequently produced in the late Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. Through the analysis of legislative documents that have regulated Russian public health since their first codification in 1971 until now, we traced transformations of the state’s biopolitical agenda. We demonstrate how the Soviet paternalistic state aimed to provide health(care) for all while coercing those who did not share its ideals of health. We show how the liberalisation and marketisation of the 1990s attempted to transform citizens into responsible patient-consumers, and how, nowadays, public health regulation balances neoliberal ideas of health and Soviet notions of control. ‘Reading off’ legislative documents highlights how public health is transformed in line with biopolitical agendas, which exist in continuity and are deeply rooted both in the agendas of the past and imaginaries of the future.
Gowree Balendran & John Abraham
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends rivaroxaban for stroke prevention in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation in England. While not a directive to practitioners, that advice is widely regarded as authoritative and intended to guide practice. Yet a medical device, INRatio2-PT for monitoring coagulation/blood-clotting and producing crucial data on rivaroxaban in its key clinical trial, was defective. Following discovery of the defective device, a medical controversy about the therapeutic value of rivaroxaban ensued. Drawing on social science theories of medical controversies, such as ‘chronic contestation’, ‘closure’, ‘corporate bias’, and ‘countervailing powers’, this article describes the unfolding of the INRatio2-PT/rivaroxaban controversy and seeks to explain it. We explore the role of key protagonists based on documentary and interview data. Our findings about the media partly support ‘countervailing powers’ theory, while those regarding industry and regulators support ‘corporate bias’ theory. We found little evidence of chronic contestation of medical knowledge-claims. Rather, we contend that a sociological process of closure through synthetic certainization of knowledge-claims that rivaroxaban is efficacious and cost-effective evolved via the combined political power and interests of the medical-industrial complex, capitalist industry, and the regulatory state. Synthetic certainization, together with a regulatory ideological commitment to innovation, curtailed contestation and discouraged the medical profession from facing troubling uncertainties.
Daniel R. R. Bradford, Denise Brown, Gerry McCartney, Margaret Douglas, Ruth Dundas & David Walsh
Concerns exist that mortality remains elevated after COVID-19 peaks. This study examined whether mortality in England and Scotland in 2022 exceeded predictions from austerity-era (2012–2019) and pre-austerity (2001–2010) trends. Time trend analysis was conducted using data from 2001–2022. The outcomes were observed and expected age- and sex-standardised mortality rates (ASMRs). Expected 2022 ASMRs were calculated from austerity-era and pre-austerity trends. Excess deaths were estimated by comparing observed and expected ASMRs. Observed ASMRs were higher than austerity-era predictions and substantially higher than pre-austerity predictions. In England, excesses for females were 4.4% (4.0–4.8) and 38.2% (95% CI: 37.7–38.7), and 7.2% (6.8–7.6) and 57.0% (56.4–57.6) for males. In Scotland, excesses for females were 3.4% (2.2–4.5) and 26.6% (25.2–28.0), and 2.6% (1.5–3.8) and 45.2% (43.6–46.9) for males. COVID-19 accounted for 5.3–6.5% of deaths in 2022 and explained much of the excess compared to austerity-era trends. ASMRs were 1.68–1.94 times higher in the most versus least deprived areas. Deaths attributable to COVID-19 explain much of the excess compared to austerity-era trends. However, 879,430 excess deaths relative to pre-austerity trends, even excluding COVID-19 deaths, highlights the devastating impacts of austerity on public health.
Paul Ward & Belinda Lunnay
By examining hope through a sociological lens, this commentary frames hope as a critical sociopolitical tool for public health to address structural inequalities and foster healthier communities. We draw on Paolo Freire’s pedagogies of oppression and hope, since they provide a ‘praxis of hope’. We explore the concept of hope – explaining what it is, to then consider what it enables – conveying the ways hope is imperative to human flourishing and imperative in the imagined future of public health. We present a case for public health engagement in developing ‘hope-based’ practices and policies which means working with communities to identify the factors acting as oppressive forces and then, through critical consciousness development, working towards overcoming these in a move towards hope (and health).
Challenges of researching racism in healthcare
Hannah Bradby, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Beth Maina Ahlberg & Sarah Hamed
The unprecedented transnational protests following the killing of George Floyd highlighted the need to re-examine institutions that uphold various social injustices experienced by racialised minorities. Black Lives Matter protests thus created a serious reckoning with racism and facilitated global conversations. Against the backdrop of these protests, we evaluate our study of healthcare workers, exploring racialisation in Swedish healthcare including the design and implementation of an anti-racist initiative in healthcare education. We reflect on how the silencing of discussion around racism in Sweden led to difficulties in recruiting participants and the effect of the shift in public discourse following the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. The project was ultimately successful in recruitment and outreach to professional and regional authorities. However, this success is contrasted by the lack of structural change in embedding anti-racism as a core value in healthcare practice. We conclude by noting that conversations about anti-racism differ from implementing anti-racist practice in commissioning, evaluation, and service delivery.
Biologics of resistance: Open Insulin and the limits of bioengineering-as-activism
Andy Murray
The Open Insulin Project is a community lab-based effort to make affordable insulin using bioengineering. The growth of financialised biotechnology and biomedicine yielded both a crisis of access to motivate and surplus resources to enable Open Insulin. Project volunteers attempted turn spillover expertise and materials against the status quo to produce a ‘biologic of resistance.’ However, adopting the production of a biologic pharmaceutical as the project’s core ultimately constrained their resistance effort. The focus on the available resources and expertise limited project members’ ability to manage important dimensions of producing usable insulin, including the imposing prospects of purification, scaling, and regulatory approval and the legal nuances of intellectual property. Paradoxically, Open Insulin members found themselves reproducing key features of the financialised biomedical model they aimed to resist, including the embrace of hype and speculation, the depoliticisation of intellectual property, and pressure for accelerated regulatory approval. This case demonstrates how the commonsense logics of contemporary biocapitalism can carry over into resistance movements and limit their capacity. The emergence of community biology and biotechnology initiatives like Open Insulin calls attention to biomedical inequities and provides a vision of biomedicine operating on more altruistic motives. However, it also raises questions about the limits of technological interventions to address inequities in financialised biocapitalism. The embrace of a narrow strategy that privileges technological intervention ultimately resulted in a similarly narrow, incremental form of resistance that shied away from broader systemic critiques.
Good chemistry and its interruptions: about caring scientists and uncooperative molecules
Jonna Brenninkmeijer & Jeannette Pols
Science policy has increasingly organised science as if it were a training ground for excellent individual scientists who can be found through fierce competition for research money and publications. This focus on science as a competition for research excellence is embedded in a specific interpretation of what ‘good’ scientific practices are. Ethnographic analyses of scientific practices using the notion of care can elucidate what good science implies in practice and how it is perhaps hindered. In a Dutch chemistry lab, researchers cared for good science by working towards socio-material collaboration. They were responsible for each other, their materials, and their chemistry work. They shared knowledge and skills to affect the material world. And they were dependent on the actions of their colleagues, technologies and chemicals. Their work was exciting because of this socio-material collaboration, but also frustrating when resistance of materials or competition hindered their caring practices. That is, good science as a collaborative and knowledge sharing practice was hindered by current values about good science which emphasise research excellence and positive results, especially when chemicals did not collaborate. This asks for an understanding of care and good science that is not merely focussed on successful research practices, but also on the hard (sometimes slow, boring or frustrating) work that does not always feel ‘good’ or end ‘well’, but is still part of the research process.
Modes of visual framing in neuropsychological deception detection research
Larissa Kaiser
In the German context, where legal skepticism toward polygraph-testing intersects with emerging concerns about AI-based deception detection, neuroscientists position their work through methodological restraint and epistemic distancing. Their critical stance toward both visual determinism and applied polygraph-tests serves not only to manage uncertainty, but to claim scientific authority in a contested field. By tracing how visual framing enables both conceptual clarity and epistemic credibility, the analysis contributes to STS debates on the role of visuality in scientific knowledge production. It calls for closer attention to how images, practices, and imaginaries mutually shape what counts as evidence and epistemic possibility in neuroscience.
Challenging epistemic injustices in the 2020 Environmental Performance Index: an engagement
José Antonio Ballesteros-Figueroa
This article presents an engagement study rooted in ethnographic fieldwork at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) during the development of the 2020 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a widely cited global metric for assessing environmental policy performance. As both researcher and participant, I reflect on the tensions and power dynamics that emerged when questioning the epistemic assumptions embedded in the quantification of environmental governance. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and theories of epistemic injustice, I analyze how quantitative devices (QDs) like the EPI reinforce global hierarchies by excluding or subsuming territories with limited data infrastructure or contested sovereignty. The study explores how decisions about what counts as a “country,” what data are “valid,” and who gets to decide these criteria are shaped by sociotechnical, political, and institutional constraints. I document my efforts to co-create more inclusive knowledge practices through the development of threshold questions for evaluating sovereignty, which sought to challenge the index’s default reliance on ISO codes and centralized governance assumptions. Despite the partial success in including some underrepresented territories, many others remained excluded, revealing how data availability and political recognition jointly structure epistemic visibility. This paper argues that efforts to reform global environmental metrics must move beyond technical fixes to confront the historical and structural injustices that shape knowledge production. By illuminating the micro-politics of quantification, the study contributes to broader debates on environmental justice, data ethics, and the responsibilities of researchers in co-producing more equitable representations of the world.
Science, Technology, & Human Values
Luna Dolezal, Karl Atkin, Nik Brown, Sanna Metsäketo, Sarah Nettleton, and Daniel Robins
This article examines the phenomenology of nursing care delivered through Välkky, a full-body teleoperated humanoid robot trialed in a Finnish hospital ward in 2023. Bringing science and technology studies into dialogue with phenomenology, we analyze qualitative data from observations, focus groups, and interviews with nurse-operators, managers, roboticists, and one patient involved in the pilot. We argue that Välkky’s deployment constituted a “robot drama” in which the frictions between robotic imaginaries and situated clinical practice produced “infrastructural inversions,” making visible normally tacit dimensions of nursing care. To conceptualize these dimensions, we develop the notion of “experiential care infrastructures”: the embodied, affective, and relational conditions that underpin care but can be overlooked in task-based approaches to robot design. Our analysis shows that Välkky afforded limited experiences of telepresence, and that nurses found the technology to interrupt rather than enable caring relations. We conclude that the design and deployment of telepresence robots in healthcare settings must attend to experiential infrastructures that make ethical and relational care possible.
Navigating Indeterminacy in Wildfire Risk Map Production in the United States
Miranda Simes
Wildfire risk maps have emerged as a prevalent yet contested scientific object in the United States and internationally. These maps, often a patchwork of bright reds and oranges, depict relative risk scores for different locations. Dozens of these maps from private companies and public agencies have proliferated in recent years, yet members of the public and scientists alike have posed questions about map accuracy: can the maps reliably depict the risk of such infrequent, high-consequence events? In this article, I examine these maps as a contribution to the Science and Technology Studies scholarship on the production of risk assessments. Though they appear orderly and neat, wildfire risk maps are the result of complicated, layered scientific decisions. Drawing on interviews with wildfire risk map producers, I analyze how these maps are socially constructed and materialize future risk. Almost universally, these map producers share a lack of confidence in their approaches to modeling wildfire risk because they view wildfire as unpredictable and risk modeling as faulty. How then do these actors determine what constitutes success or a lack thereof? I find that many, in their attempts to navigate indeterminacy, turn instead to personal knowledge of wildfire risk in the places they live.
Ask the Dust: The Rise of Popular Expology in Pesticide Activism in France
Jean-Noël Jouzel, Giovanni Prete, Bastien Soutjis, and David Demortain
This article focuses on social movements’ engagement in the field of environmental health through a particular form of knowledge production: “popular expology.” This concept reflects the growing development of initiatives aimed at producing data on human exposure to pollutants, rather than establishing the causes of health effects, as “popular epidemiology” does. To develop our concept, we draw on the case of the French anti-pesticide movement. For more than a decade, organizations from this movement have increasingly invested in the performance of studies designed to demonstrate the presence of pesticide residues. We show that popular expology is encouraged by the difficulties social movements face in producing epidemiological data, by the development of a market for affordable pesticide detection tools, and by the increasing accessibility of toxicological and epidemiological knowledge produced by research and expert institutions. We also analyze two roles that popular expology plays for social movements: on the one hand, embodying invisible pollutions and raising the attention of the media to this issue; on the other hand, demonstrating weaknesses in regulatory risk assessment. This article, therefore, suggests the need for a broadening of our understanding of the use and production of science as a political mode of action for environmental social movements.
Making Soils into Carbon Sinks: A Sociology of Soil Carbon Quantification Through a French Model
Céline Granjou, Hélène Guillemot, Laure Manach, Robin Leclerc, Antoine Doré, Léo Magnin, and Stéphanie Barral
Since COP21 in 2015, carbon neutrality targets have emphasized the enhancement of various carbon sinks, including soils, to help sequester carbon away from the atmosphere. What does it take to make soils into carbon sinks? This article focuses on a French digital model of soil carbon cycling named AMG, which quantifies soil carbon stocks and their evolution under various agricultural practices. We examine how AMG circulates and transforms within a loosely connected network of actors and organizations involved in agricultural development, climate research, land-use planning public administrations, and carbon commodification. We show how the model evolves into three distinct yet interconnected regimes of carbon quantification—in climate academic research, local public action, and carbon markets—that contribute to building and expanding a sociotechnical infrastructure for quantifying soil carbon sequestration potential. Our findings contribute to the literature on environmental quantification and knowledge infrastructures by calling for a shift from viewing knowledge infrastructures as stable and fixed, toward an approach that emphasizes open-ended, flexible, and ongoing processes of infrastructuring. We also contribute to the literature on soil–human relations by emphasizing how this model fosters a new focus on the active role of soils in the global carbon cycle and climate change mitigation.
Social capital and vaccine decision-making: A scoping review
Erynn Monette & Gabrielle Duval
The term social capital has been widely used in social science to explain how relationships, norms, and shared resources shape opportunities within communities. This concept has gained recent prominence in public health research as scholars seek to understand the social dynamics underlying vaccine decision-making and hesitancy. Guided by major theoretical perspectives of Bourdieu, Coleman, and Putnam, this paper examines how social capital has been applied to the study of vaccine uptake and synthesizes research findings about its influence on vaccination behaviours. Sources (n = 581) were gathered from the databases Medline, Embase, CINAHL, and Web of Science and uploaded to Covidence. Following removal of duplicates (n = 124), the titles and abstracts of 457 sources were screened for inclusion of the search concepts “vaccination” and “social capital”. Full texts of 67 sources were screened for relevant use of search concepts (i.e., study focus on vaccination behaviours and use of “social capital” as an underpinning theory), resulting in 34 articles for final inclusion. Studies were coded for their theoretical grounding, methodology, and the specific forms of capital examined. Findings indicate that social capital shapes vaccine decision-making in complex and context-dependent ways. While higher levels of trust, cohesion, or civic participation are often associated with vaccine uptake, strong bonding ties and community-embedded norms sometimes facilitate the spread of misinformation and reinforce hesitancy. Overall, the review demonstrates that social capital can function as both a facilitator and barrier to vaccination, underscoring the importance of local context and the need for nuanced, theory-informed approaches to understanding vaccine behaviours.
Lisa Hinton, Katherine Tucker, Carol Dumelow, Sabrina Keating, Lucy C. Chappell & Richard J. McManus
Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, experienced by around 10% of women, are among the most severe health problems affecting people during and following pregnancy. Symptoms can persist in the weeks and months following birth, with potential to impact longer-term health. Postnatal care has long been recognised as a critical period for mother and baby, and emerging evidence suggests it is a window of opportunity for cardiac remodelling after a hypertensive pregnancy. But provision is often not fit for purpose and haphazard. To understand what care women receive, how it gets done, and additional barriers for minority or socially deprived groups, we undertook interviews and focus groups with 44 women with a recent hypertensive pregnancy and interviews with 36 health professionals providing postnatal care in National Health Service (NHS) maternity care, primary care and community services in England. Analysis revealed that, despite the first six weeks being an important period for managing blood pressure, women often fall through the cracks between secondary and primary care. Invisible to these siloed clinical specialities, women are faced with new self-management and surveillance responsibilities alongside the work of new motherhood. Analysis, informed by Meleis’s transitions theory and Gidden’s concept of ‘distanciation’, develops Scott’s ‘sociology of nothing’ to explore responsibilities and consequences of being ‘unseen’ between services.
Shuai Zhang, Xueli Yao, Qingwei Song, Jing Zhou & Meili Cheng
Talking about suicide and self-harm with depressed adolescents is a delicate aspect of psychotherapeutic interaction. While conversation analytic studies on suicide risk assessment have concentrated on adult populations in western settings, little is known about how suicide and self-harm are initiated in Mandarin-language psychotherapy for depressed adolescents. Drawing on conversation analysis and employing 24 audio recordings as the data, this study examined how talk about suicide and self-harm was initiated and responded to in psychotherapeutic interactions with depressed adolescents in China. We identified two primary initiation patterns: therapist-initiated inquiries and client-initiated disclosures. Specifically, therapists initiated inquiries by grounding inquiries in clients’ prior accounts, softening inquiries, and progressing incrementally from general mood inquiries to specific questions about suicide and self-harm. Clients initiated disclosures by embedding disclosures in their narratives, managing delicacy through mitigations, and exercising agency in shaping the therapeutic agenda. Both patterns were accomplished through calibrated interactional practices that balanced therapeutic obligations with the sensitivity of the topic, presenting the initiation as collaborative achievements shaped by mutual orientation to delicacy. This study contributed to the understanding of the complexities in the psychotherapeutic interactions with adolescents with depression and provides implications for offering evidence-based insights into recognizing and responding to the openings of suicidal talk.
The ethics and moral psychology of HPV vaccination: Evidence from a cross-cultural study
M. Alejandra Petino Zappala, Andrea Quint, T.N. Phuc Nguyen, Julia V. Schulz, Johannes T. Doerflinger & Nora C. Heinzelmann
Vaccine hesitancy is a major threat to public health worldwide. Debates about vaccines are often moralized; however, how ethics and ethical judgments relate to vaccination intention remains underexplored. Here, we identify ethically relevant concerns from the academic literature that we operationalize for a pre-registered survey to study how ethical judgments relate to parents’ intentions to vaccinate their children against HPV. We also investigate potential sociocultural influences on ethical judgments: we compare parents from the US, the UK, and Germany. We find that parents’ ethical judgments in all countries are strongly associated with vaccination intention. We also find cross-cultural differences in how their trust in science, physicians, and institutions relates to perceived sociomoral pressure. Still, in the three countries trust moderates the negative correlation between perceived health risks and vaccination intention. These results suggest that campaigns highlighting ethical aspects of vaccination and targeting relevant moral concerns could be effective against hesitancy.
Alissa Greer, Becca Wood, Naomi Zakimi, Benjamin D. Scher
Historically, coercive and distrustful relations between police and people who use drugs have contributed to profound and enduring health harms. British Columbia’s drug decriminalization policy, introduced in 2023, aimed to shift these dynamics and promote health and wellbeing by reducing criminalization and improving interactions with police. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 38 people who use drugs with diverse and intersecting structural vulnerabilities, including Indigeneity, racialization, and economic and housing precarity, we examine perceptions and experiences of policing and policy during the first year of decriminalization. Participants described a persistent legacy of police violence, including physical, psychological, and symbolic harms, that shaped enduring mistrust toward both policing and the policy itself. This mistrust constrained the perceived legitimacy of decriminalization, with participants questioning whether the policy meaningfully altered entrenched institutional practices, culture, or power relations. Past and present policing also remained a structuring force of social marginalization, shaping the everyday realities of people who use drugs. Rather than a departure from previous enforcement regimes, the legacies of policing overshadowed the potential benefits of decriminalization. These findings demonstrate how historical harms and institutional legacies mediate health-oriented policy reforms through fear, mistrust, and constrained legitimacy. Drug decriminalization is not implemented in a vacuum; its capacity to improve health and wellbeing depends on the sociohistorical contexts and legacies that structure how people engage with police, institutions, and health policy.
Apei Song
Social workers play a critical yet underexamined role in HIV prevention and treatment in China’s remote ethnic minority regions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 in two Yi-autonomous mountain townships, this study examines how social workers navigate structural inequality and constraints within HIV care. This study identifies three interrelated agentic practices. First, women’s healing workshops provide spaces that empower widowed women living with HIV through relational and cultural forms of support. Second, social workers advance drug assignment by advocating for simplified antiretroviral regimens, negotiating flexible dispensing arrangements, and translating biomedical knowledge into locally meaningful terms. Third, social workers engage in emotional stabilization and decriminalizing care, softening surveillance-oriented governance through ethical discretion and relational mediation. Framing as “new barefoot doctors,” social workers enact relational, structural, and institutional forms of agency that repair inequities and humanize HIV governance. The findings highlight the importance of culturally embedded, equity-oriented social work in advancing humane and effective HIV care in marginalized settings.
Bargaining and calibration: How SGM people navigate intersectional oppression in healthcare
Ning Hsieh & Stef M. Shuster
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) people experience far-reaching health inequities, yet their responses to such oppression remain underexplored. Related, recent scholarship has called for more intersectional analyses of SGM health. Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of 40 SGM individuals, this study investigates participants’ experienced and anticipated barriers to care, the strategies employed to navigate these challenges, and how an intersectional lens offers a different vantage point to analyze their experiences. We identify bargaining – giving up or downplaying aspects of identities and relevant health information – and calibration – adjusting actions in anticipation of oppression – as two strategies participants used to navigate healthcare under intersecting inequalities related to sexuality, gender, and race/ethnicity. These ongoing strategies helped participants manage healthcare barriers and anticipated discrimination but came with significant costs to their health. We contribute to medical sociology by introducing the concepts of bargaining and calibration as agentic responses to healthcare inequities.
Megan Q. Linton & Kai Jacobsen
The pivot to telehealth through the COVID-19 pandemic spawned numerous private investor-owned virtual care firms, capitalizing on loopholes and outdated policies in Canada’s healthcare regulatory framework. Amidst neoliberal biocapitalism, these health technology firms are increasingly functioning as primary care providers to fill the growing gaps in care under austerity. Contemporary health companies co-opt identity politics and social movement rhetoric in their marketing, transforming marginalized communities into profitable niche markets. One such company is PurposeMed, a venture-capital backed start-up that operates private virtual clinics for HIV PrEP medication (Freddie), gender-affirming care (Foria), ADHD assessment and prescribing (Frida), and a pharmacy (Affirming Care). We analyze PurposeMed as a case study to illustrate broader trends in the creeping privatization of health. We reveal the results of a power structure and social network analysis of PurposeMed to understand the corporate powers transforming Canadian health care. Next, we present a critical discourse analysis of PurposeMed’s marketing and branding strategies, highlighting their exploitation of the existing digital networks and health information-seeking patterns of queer, trans, and neurodivergent communities to accumulate capital. Combined, our results demonstrate that healthcare privatization and commercialization in Canada is not an accident; rather, PurposeMed is the inevitable result of deliberate policy choices and austerity politics. We conclude by calling for urgent scholarly attention to the communities targeted by creeping privatization of Canadian health care and the firms profiting from them.
Brooke Whitfield
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the U.S. have been persistently high for over a decade, and they disproportionately burden young people. Yet limited qualitative research has explored how young people understand, navigate, and experience STIs amid this ongoing epidemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 33 young people (ages 15–25) across Texas, this study examines the gendered dynamics of STI prevention, testing, and treatment through a reproductive labor framework. Findings reveal adolescent girls and young women assume the majority of sexual health labor: managing prevention, initiating testing, and coping with the emotional and relational consequences of infection. This unequal distribution of labor appears linked to the greater salience of STIs for adolescent girls and young women, as the sexual double standard renders testing positive more consequential for them than for adolescent boys and young men. At the same time, young men’s limited engagement in STI prevention reflects broader structural neglect: sex education and reproductive health policy in the U.S. have long centered on pregnancy prevention and excluded young men. As a result, young people of all genders are poorly equipped to engage in proactive, communicative approaches to STI prevention. By extending the concept of reproductive labor beyond fertility and contraception to encompass STI-related care, this study highlights how gendered and heteronormative systems of education and policy produce unequal sexual health responsibilities. Comprehensive, inclusive sex education that reframes STI prevention as shared sexual health work can help redistribute this labor and reduce STI burden among young people.
Yong Yu, Wenzhao Huang & Shishi Tang
Background
With the scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), people living with HIV (PLWH) increasingly require non-HIV inpatient and procedural care in general hospitals, yet access remains precarious.
Aims
To examine how refusals of non-HIV care for PLWH unfold within routine general-hospital workflows.
Methods
We conducted an interpretive qualitative study in three provincial capitals in China (Changsha, Guangzhou, and Nanning) between May 2024 and October 2025. We interviewed 58 PLWH about one index non-HIV care-seeking episode each (80 interviews, including 22 follow-ups) and 16 key informants spanning perioperative, ward/bed, infection-control, and HIV follow-up roles. Episodes were reconstructed as node-by-node event chains and analysed using framework analysis and mechanism-oriented thematic analysis.
Results
Participants seldom described refusal as a single explicit denial. Instead, they described a recurrent care-refusal cascade across routine nodes including admission, consultation, perioperative assessment, ward acceptance, and transfer. Five linked mechanism modules connected HIV visibility to responsibility shifting, procedural deferral or delay, pathway resetting, navigation burden, and anticipatory avoidance. Costs are reported only as banded spillover indicators. The cascade appeared less likely to escalate when decision ownership was explicit, HIV was managed under standard precautions, and navigation support was available.
Conclusion
Unequal access can be interpreted as processual discrimination embedded in routine workflow governance rather than as isolated acts of refusal. By specifying a process model of “denial without denial”, the study identifies organisational breakpoints for accountable, traceable, and repairable hospital pathway governance.
Anthony Shuko Musiwa, Morten Skovdal & Lawrence Mbuagbaw
Men’s participation in antenatal care (ANC) is widely seen as essential for improving access, uptake, and pregnancy outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the region with the world’s highest maternal and child mortality rates. However, current studies often approach participation narrowly through involvement in biomedical ANC, overlooking local fatherhood experiences and men’s relational and culturally grounded roles beyond clinical settings. Drawing on Afro-communitarianism and social capital frameworks, we conducted a qualitative study in Mafararikwa, rural Eastern Zimbabwe to explore the forms and meanings of men’s participation in ANC and the relational and communal factors influencing such participation. Collaborating with 101 participants including health professionals, caregivers, and community key informants, we generated data using in-depth interviews, consultative sessions, focus group discussions, and storyboarding. We thematically analyzed the data in QDA Miner Lite using a thematic networks approach, identifying two main themes and nine sub-themes highlighting men’s dynamic roles during pregnancy and ANC—leadership, decision-making, provision, protection, domestic support, emotional support, love, and care—embedded in relational and communal structures. The themes also revealed that men coordinated with spouses, relatives, community members, and diverse ANC providers to support ANC across indigenous and biomedical settings, demonstrating collective responsibility. Men’s ANC participation in Mafararikwa highlights local fatherhood experiences, Afro-communitarian values of identity and solidarity, and social capital mechanisms of resource mobilization, reciprocity, and trust. Interventions should recognize men’s diverse roles, leverage relational networks, and integrate culturally rooted approaches to ANC. Further research should apply Afrocentric frameworks, foregrounding local fatherhood experiences, Afro-communitarian values, and social support networks.
Elias Weiss & Barbara Prainsack
For a long time, scholarship on solidarity has primarily focused on its prosocial dimensions. Solidarity is typically seen as a socially, ethically, or politically desirable good—something that strengthens or expresses social cohesion. More recently, however, scholars have begun to examine the troubling aspects of solidarity. In this paper, we argue that problematic, or even harmful, forms of solidarity fall into two main categories. First, exclusive solidarity, where solidarity among a group deprives those excluded from access to essential goods or rights. Second, misappropriated solidarity, where the main benefits accrue to those performing solidarity—sometimes even at the expense of those ostensibly meant to benefit. Using two specific examples, we show how excluding migrants from public healthcare harms both the excluded and the included, weakening the broader solidaristic system. We also argue that using collective insurance contributions to fund unproven treatments, such as homoeopathy, can undermine trust and fairness. Finally, we revisit debates on linking healthcare entitlements to lifestyle choices to illustrate how exclusion and misappropriation can combine. We conclude that adopting an understanding of moral agents as shaped by their relationships to others can help prevent solidarity from becoming harmful.
Hyojin Im
Urban Somali refugees in Nairobi, Kenya, navigate healthcare within a landscape defined by chronic insecurity, fragmented governance, and racialized exclusion. This ethnographic study examines how Somali refugees in Eastleigh experience and respond to medical precarity, understood as a structurally produced condition where formal health institutions are present yet inaccessible. Drawing on key informant interviews and focus group discussions with 98 refugees, health workers, and community leaders, alongside field observations conducted between 2018 and 2019, the analysis shows how care is deferred, avoided, and reassembled under conditions of economic constraint, legal risk, and institutional mistrust. Rather than withdrawing from care altogether, participants navigated illness through relational infrastructures that include pharmacies, household networks, and trusted intermediaries providing credit, advice, and continuity. These practices make care possible while also exposing refugees to exploitation and uneven quality in poorly regulated pharmaceutical markets. Participants also articulated a moral horizon of health shaped by aspirations for dignified treatment and transnational imaginaries of functioning health systems. The findings show that improvised care is not an informal deviation but a rational and ethical response to structural neglect. Medical precarity, in this context, does not merely constrain care; it reorganizes care through relational infrastructures and a pastoralist logic of medical seeking, characterized by continual recalibration of trust, cost, safety, and recognition across fragmented health systems. Yet these practices cannot fully resolve the health capability gap between knowing what care requires and having the conditions to make such care possible.
The hope gap: a qualitative analysis of tiered hypertension care in China
Bo Li
Despite China’s tiered healthcare system positioning primary care as the cornerstone of hypertension management, patients’ bypassing of community clinics for hospital care reveals a hope gap as an unequal institutional capacity to cultivate the resources essential for sustained condition management that quality- and trust-based explanations leave unexamined. Drawing on abductive thematic analysis of 24 semi-structured interviews with hypertensive patients in Shenzhen, and guided by Gili & Mangone’s sociology of hope, this study explores how hope is socially mediated through patient-provider interactions across care levels and how these experiences of hope influence treatment-seeking decisions. Findings reveal that community clinics typically generated fragile, contingent forms of hope due to perceived limitations in expertise and resources, leading some patients to delay or avoid care. Hospitals, by contrast, offered structured and anticipatory hope, albeit undermined by overcrowding and long waits, reinforcing patients’ preference for hospital care. Patients navigated these hope differentials, investing time, money, and effort to secure hope as a resource for managing hypertension. By conceptualising hope as relational, socially embedded, and structurally produced, the study advances a sociological understanding of systemic inequities in healthcare access and utilisation. Addressing the hope gap, rather than solely redistributing clinical resources, may be key to strengthening primary care and alleviating hospital strain in China and comparable tiered systems.
Nilüfer Akalın
This article examines how immigrant-serving community-based organizations become implicated in state monitoring systems as they partner with public health programs. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with medical professionals, frontline workers, and administrators in a city in Upstate New York, I analyze how data requirements tied to state health programs incorporate immigrant-serving organizations into systems of oversight. Using the concept of system embeddedness, I show that (1) the financial precarity of immigrant-serving organizations, combined with their trusted relationships with immigrant communities, makes them indispensable actors in state-led health programs and gives rise to datafication practices; (2) data functions as a form of currency, as organizations receive funding in exchange for collecting multilayered information about immigrants; and (3) these data are entered into interoperable infrastructures that circulate information across agencies, increasing immigrants’ legibility and monitoring. The article demonstrates how CBOs become key sites where care and oversight are co-produced, and it foregrounds the ethical stakes of expanding data infrastructures in immigrant healthcare contexts amid intensified immigration enforcement. The findings highlight the need to rethink how data are collected, shared, and used in ways that protect community trust while limiting the incorporation of care sites into expansive surveillance regimes.
Human milk for cancer care: Science-in-extension and gendered digital labor
Revital Harari, Ayelet Oreg & Anat Herbst-Debby
This qualitative case study examines how human milk is framed, negotiated, and justified as a therapeutic resource for adults with cancer within a large digital peer-to-peer human milk-sharing community. Drawing on discourse analysis of posts and comment threads from an online group dedicated to milk donation for oncology patients, the study analyzes how participants construct therapeutic meaning in a context marked by biomedical uncertainty and limited institutional guidance. The findings show that members selectively draw on a pragmatic mode of reasoning we term ‘Science-in-Extension’, in which biomedical language and principles are selectively appropriated and applied beyond their established evidentiary contexts. Rather than fully rejecting biomedical authority, participants appear to rework it in pragmatic ways within a digitally mediated space of uncertainty.
Shixin Huang & Tat Chor Au-Yeung
Attracting and maintaining a sustainable care workforce is a persistent global challenge for the long-term care (LTC) sector. Personal care workers account for the largest proportion of the LTC workforce and provide the most frequent daily assistance to older adults with complex care needs. Yet, their caring labour has been poorly recognized and valued by the society. Keating et al. (2021) suggested that because of chronic system failures in the LTC sector, personal care workers experience substantial “well-being failure” characterized by adverse well-being outcomes in multiple dimensions, including material, relational, and subjective well-being. The concept of “well-being failure” highlights how the care crisis imposes collective well-being challenges on the personal care workforce, calling for a systemic understanding of workers’ hardships at a structural level. Drawing from the theory of institutional logics from the organization studies literature, in this study we examine the institutional logics that shape the well-being failure of personal care workers in residential care homes. Using the residual-productivist welfare regime of Hong Kong as a critical case example, together with in-depth interviews with 52 personal care workers and stakeholders in the LTC sector, we argue that the professional logics of professional hierarchy and the regulatory logics of compliance and risk containment have systematically translated into dysfunctional care culture and organizational arrangements that demoralize personal care workers at the frontline of care. Practical implications for team communication and collaboration between regulator and private service-providers are discussed.
Alix Boirot & Marta Lotto
Background
Alcohol consumption among bartenders is higher than in most other professions. However, the cultural and occupational meanings of drinking in this setting are underexplored.
Methods
Drawing on symbolic interactionism, this ethnographic study explores how bartenders interpret and regulate their alcohol use in their professional environment. Fieldwork was conducted in Marseille, France, in 2023 and included 22 in-depth semi-structured interviews and 320 h of participant observation with 38 bartenders working in 33 independent bars. Data were analysed inductively.
Results
Findings reveal a “professional culture of drinking” where alcohol serves multiple functions: commercial, relational, ritual, and self-regulatory. Bartender drinking was tolerated by all concerned parties (managers, clients, etc.) and was often considered part of their identity, provided that service quality remained unaffected. Consumption frequently occurred in a “grey zone” where personal and professional boundaries were blurred. While most bartenders interviewed recognized the associated risks, they mainly emphasized mental not physical harms. They feared dependence but rarely sought formal healthcare services; instead, informal peer-based regulation and support predominated, together with self-regulation strategies like limiting hours of drinking and using non-alcoholic shots.
Conclusions
Alcohol use among bartenders cannot be understood solely as a health-risk behaviour; it must be situated within professional norms and social logics. Public health interventions should move beyond prescriptive regulation to co-constructed approaches to prevention that respect occupational culture, valorise existing peer-based moderation practices, and strengthen dialogue between health professionals, employers, and workers.
Rethinking the social structuring of health: Toward an epidemiological sociology
David Consolazio
This paper engages with ongoing debates on the limitations of social epidemiology in explaining the social structuring of health. While the field has been highly successful in documenting the patterned distribution of health outcomes across social groups, it remains largely anchored in an epidemiological paradigm that prioritises identifying statistical associations over explaining underlying social processes. Building on this limitation, the paper argues for a reorientation towards what can be defined as an epidemiological sociology, in which sociological theory plays a central role in shaping research questions, analytical strategies, and the interpretation of empirical findings. In doing so, it argues for re-centring sociological thinking in the study of health, emphasising the role of agency, social mechanisms, and meaning-making processes. By advancing a more integrated perspective on the relationship between social conditions and health – illustrated through a critical engagement with research strands such as intersectionality, social network analysis, agent-based modelling, experimental psychosocial interventions, behavioural economics, qualitative methods, biological pathways, and neighbourhood effects – the paper contributes to ongoing efforts to bridge sociology and epidemiology. It ultimately suggests that a stronger incorporation of sociological insights can support the development of more effective and equitable public health interventions by targeting the mechanisms through which health inequalities emerge.
