From Health Behaviours to Health Practices Critical Perspectives

A wide range of international contributions draw on theoretical and empirical sources to explore whether alternatives exist to both conceptualise and conduct research into what people do and don’t do, in relation to their health and experiences of illness.

• Presents a collection of international contributions that complement, as well as critique, dominant conceptualisations of health behaviour
• Includes a wide range of both theoretical perspectives and empirical cases
• Reasserts the unique contribution social sciences can make to health research
• Challenges assumptions about the usefulness of the concept of health behaviour
• A timely publication given the rise of chronic and lifestyle diseases and the resulting changes in global health agendas

Simon Cohn is a Reader in Medical Anthropology at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on issues related to diagnosis, contested conditions and chronic illness in the UK and other high-income societies. With a strong commitment to contemporary social theory, Cohn is interested in ways in which innovative social science can shape aspects of medical practice.

Notes on contributors vii

1 From health behaviours to health practices: an introduction 1
Simon Cohn

2 Actors, patients and agency: a recent history 7
David Armstrong

3 A socially situated approach to inform ways to improve health and wellbeing 19
Christine Horrocks and Sally Johnson

4 A relational approach to health practices: towards transcending the agency-structure divide 31
Gerry Veenstra and Patrick John Burnett

5 Environmental justice and health practices: understanding how health inequities arise at the local level 43
Katherine L. Frohlich and Thomas Abel

6 Why behavioural health promotion endures despite its failure to reduce health inequities 57
Fran Baum and Matthew Fisher

7 Behaviour change and social blinkers? The role of sociology in trials of self-management behavior in chronic conditions 69
Bie Nio Ong, Anne Rogers, Anne Kennedy, Peter Bower, Tom Sanders, Andrew Morden, Sudeh Cheraghi-Sohi, Jane C. Richardson and Fiona Stevenson

8 Thinking about changing mobility practices: how a social practice approach can help 82
Sarah Nettleton and Judith Green

9 Providers’ constructions of pregnant and early parenting women who use substances 95
Cecilia Benoit, Camille Stengel, Lenora Marcellus, Helga Hallgrimsdottir, John Anderson, Karen MacKinnon,
Rachel Phillips, Pilar Zazueta and Sinead Charbonneau

10 Staying ‘in the zone’ but not passing the ‘point of no return’: embodiment, gender and drinking in mid-life 106
Antonia C. Lyons, Carol Emslie and Kate Hunt

11 Complexities and contingencies conceptualised: towards a model of reproductive navigation 120
Erica van der Sijpt

12 Sustained multiplicity in everyday cholesterol reduction: repertoires and practices in talk about ‘healthy living’ 132
Catherine M. Will and Kate Weiner

13 Enjoy your food: on losing weight and taking pleasure 145
Else Vogel and Annemarie Mol

Index 158

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