INFORMATION ABOUT THE WORKING GROUPS

Movements as Collective Challenges to Authority Structures

University of Notre Dame August 14-15, 2002
Meets: Wednesday, August 14th, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
&
Thursday, August 15th, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm

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Working Group 2:  Health Social Movements.  Phil Brown, Brown University;  Stephen Zavestoski, Providence College;  Sabrina McCormick, Brown University;  Brian Mayer,  Brown University; 

Health social movements are very important components of our health care system, and a major force for change in our larger society. They differ from most other social movements in three ways: 1) they introduce the biological body to social movements in previously unknown ways, 2) they typically include challenges to existing medical/scientific knowledge and practice, and 3) they often involve activists collaborating with scientists and health professionals in pursuing treatment, prevention, research, and expanded funding.

Women's health activists have greatly altered medical conceptions of women, expanded reproductive rights, expanded funding and services in many areas, altered many treatment forms (e.g. breast cancer), and changed how medical research is conducted. AIDS activists have achieved expanded funding, much medical recognition of alternative treatment approaches to, and major shifts in how clinical trials are conducted. Mental patients rights activists brought major shifts in mental health care, including the provision of many civil rights that used to be inferior to those of prisoners, and have achieved both the right to better treatment and the power to refuse certain treatments. Citizens dealing with issues of general health access have fought against hospital closings, struggled against curtailment of medical services and of restrictions by insurers and managed care organizations, and fought for a national health plan. Self-care and alternative care activists have broadened the awareness of health professionals on the capacity of laypeople to actively deal with their health problems. Disability rights activists have garnered major advances in public policy on disability rights (accessibility, job discrimination), while also countering stigma against people with disabilities. Toxic waste activists have brought national attention to the health hazards of chemical, radiation, and other hazards, and have helped shape the development of the Superfund Program. Environmental justice activists, who are centrally concerned with environmental health, have shown the links between physical health and social health, in the process showing that health improvement and disease prevention require attention to, and reform of, a variety of social sectors, such as housing, transportation, and economic development. Occupational health and safety movements have brought medical and governmental attention to a wide range of ergonomic, radiation, chemical, and stress hazards in many workplaces.

In light of the above examples, it is hard to conceive of any discussion of health that would not take into account these health social movements. It is also surprising that the broader discussion of social movements does not take health social movements into account. As to the first point, a significant number of sociologists have written about these movements, and do view them as central to the study of health. But these have involved articles or books on individual health social movements, rather than any attempt to develop overarching theoretical and analytical frameworks for the study of health social movement. As to the second point, it is striking how absent health social movements are from social movement scholarship. We examined major sociology journals in the US from 1995 to the present, and found that only one of the 71 articles on social movements in Social Problems, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces was on a health social movement. We notice similar inattention in major books on social movements.

This workshop will help remedy that unfortunate lack of connection by providing firm links between scholarship in medical sociology, social studies of science, and social movements. The discussion will include the following issues: examining the broad array of contributions that sociologists have made to studying health social movements, why health social movements have been neglected by traditional social movement theory and scholarship, why scholars of health social movements have not employed social movement theory very much, and new alternative approach to health social movements, including our “boundary movements” approach to health social movements that we will be presenting as a paper at the mini-conference.

Recent attention to health social movements has grown. The 2001 conference of the Society for the Social Study of Science featured a stream of four sessions on social movements, most of which were health social movements, organized by Adele Clarke and Steve Epstein. A “Medical Social Movements” symposium will be held in Sweden in Fall 2002. We are also editing the 2004 Sociology of Health and Illness annual monograph, “Social Movements in Health.”
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