XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

281

Bourdieu and Questions of Power in Health

RC15 Sociology of Health (host committee)

Language: English

At a time when many western countries are experiencing increased prosperity, inequalities in healthcare remain and are even sustained. In this session, the sociology of Bourdieu will be used to illustrate how current trends in healthcare entrench health inequalities. While social inequalities in health have been documented in many studies of the Western world, inequality is defined by family socioeconomic background and social class status. There has been less focus on the relationships that create and reproduce social inequality in health; or the way that tensions and struggles within the healthcare field are also implicated in the shaping of inequality. At a time when corporatization and privatization of healthcare coexists or subsumes traditional bases of public provision we need news ways of explaining emergent structures of inequality. Papers in this session will draw on empirical work from a range of countries such as the US, UK, Australia, Denmark and Norway using Bourdieu to examine health inequality, with a particular focus on healthcare financing and care within institutions such as public and private hospitals, outpatient clinics, rehabilitation centers, and individual projects and investments towards health. The selected papers will highlight differing approaches to the use of key concepts such as capital, habitus and field in order to strengthen the theoretical grasp on the mechanisms of day to day production and reproduction of healthcare inequality.