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From Social Suffering to a Sociology of Negative?
From Social Suffering to a Sociology of Negative?
Abstract Submissions Closed
Friday, 26 February 2021: 10:45-12:15
Location:
RC15 Sociology of Health (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
Following seminal publications, such as Kleinman, Das and Lock (1997), Bourdieu et al. (1999), Frank (2001), Wilkinson (2005), and Pickering and Rosati (2012), the concept of "social suffering" has acquired currency in contemporary social science as a means to refer to lived experiences of deprivation, frustration, and affliction by oppressed people in certain social situations. With reference to the concept of social suffering, it becomes possible to draw critical attention to how subjective components of distress are rooted and conditioned by social processes and cultural conditions of structural violence and political oppression. However, we can wonder whether the scientific legitimation of the concept of "suffering" can go beyond its social qualification to include other dimensions: such as the bio-psychic dimension of pain, mental and physical illness, and disability, which highlights the vulnerability of human nature in an increasingly performative society; or the ecological dimension with environmental disasters as a consequence of the illusion of an unlimited development and of non-consideration of ecosystem balances; or the existential dimension with the loss of meaning in a post-secularized society produced by the end of the "great ideological narratives" of the twentieth century and the increasing digitalization and virtualization of reality. All this brings out that "dimension of the negative" which, often interpreted by the different mythologies and religious theodicies of the past as evidence of the existence of "evil", is actually an unavoidable component of the human condition that allows us to highlight the intrinsic and extrinsic limits of social action.
Session Organizer: