Session 1: Explaining health inequalities in economics and sociology
This presentation will cover some commonly used theoretical concepts and frameworks used in the sociology of health and illness, to understand and analyze the social production of health inequalities. These theoretical tools have been used to interrogate and examine how structural forces, institutional processes, cultural discourses and ideologies, and interactional dynamics intersect to influence the myriad pathways through which health is produced. These range from the scientific knowledge base we use to intervene on illness and disease, to the social determinants that stratify our exposures to health risks, to the ways in which we organize our healthcare and healing systems, to the encounters - both within and outside the clinic - in which bodies, wellbeing, risk, and difference are regulated and intervened on. The presentation will also include some exploration of how these theoretical tools interact with empirical approaches, as well as the interdisciplinary works and possibilities that exist.
Janet K. Shim, PhD, MPP, is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her program of research focuses on two areas: the sociological analysis of knowledge production in the health sciences, particularly how they understand social difference and health inequality; and the study of healthcare interactions and how they produce unequal outcomes. Her work has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Shim is currently a member of the U.S. NIH Genomics and Society Working Group, and Senior Editor of Social Science & Medicine. Her books include Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease (New York University Press, 2014), and the co-edited volume, Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. (Duke University Press, 2010). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Science, American Sociological Review, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, AJOB Empirical Bioethics, Social Science & Medicine, Social Studies of Science, and Sociology of Health and Illness.
