April In the Journals… (2/2)

Following up on Melanie’s In the Journals… (1/2),  here is a short sampling of other recently published articles.

On “Early View” from Sociology of Health & Illness:

In an article entitled, “Undoing gender? The Case of Complementary and Alternative Medicine,” Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliott show how middle-class Americans who use complementary and alternative medicine reproduce traditional gendered identities, and neoliberal tenets like the cultivation of personal control. Fadhila Mazanderani, Louise Locock, and John Powell have investigated what motivates people to share their experiences on the internet or in memoirs. Using literature about the commodification of illness narratives and data from a large collection of illness narratives gathered in the UK, they show how patients point to the “biographical value” of sharing their stories. Sociologist Jessica Powers Koski uses social movement theory in an analysis of eating disorder support groups in the Midwestern United States to argue that “framing and collective identity promote participation in eating disorder support groups while simultaneously constructing a collective eating disorder illness identity.” There is also an article about healthcare utilization among Gypsies/Travellers in England, and another about identity work in people with speech dysfluency (stutter/stammering).

The most current print issue of Sociology of Health & Illness features articles that have been available online for a few months, but I’ll highlight some that may be of interest. Neil Stephens, Jamie Lewis, and Paul Atkinson write about uncertainty in the regulatory frameworks that govern stem cell research, drawing on ethnographic data from the UK Stem Cell Bank and another British laboratory. Catriona Rooke writes about the increasing use of harm reduction approaches in English tobacco control strategy. Renata Kokanovic, Gillian Bendelow, and Brigid Philip discuss dissonance in lay accounts of Australians diagnosed with depression that vacillate between medicalized discourse of depression and emphasis on the social context of distress.

There are also two articles in the same issue about “good death”: Erica Borgstrom, Stephen Barclay, and Simon Cohn show how denial appears as a disease-like, treatable object to UK medical students confronting dying patients, and Hannah Frith, Jayne Raisborough, and Orly Klein examine the cultural labor of constructing deaths as good or bad, with reference to media coverage of the death of UK reality television star Jade Goody.

In the April issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, there is an article evaluating the association between miscarriage and exposure to stress during pregnancy caused by rocket-attack alarm sirens in southern Israel.

Finally, the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine announced that it will run editorials in which ethnobiologists reflect on their first fieldwork experiences, though none have been published yet.  In March, that journal published a study that highlights the public health benefits of educating dairy farmers in Pakistan about the management of houseflies.