Healthcare Professionals As Cultural Agents: Exploring the Intersections of Medical Knowledge, Cultural Hegemony and "Common Sense"

The relationship between healthcare fields, medical authority and cultural power have increasingly come into focus in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. The provision of healthcare and medical knowledge is intertwined with a complex web of social inequalities, including but not limited to gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, and immigration status. This session seeks to explore the entanglements of the healthcare field with prevailing constructions of cultural hegemony and Gramscian common sense, examining the dynamics through which these can be mutually reinforcing or in productive tension. Papers in this session may address:

* The role of healthcare professionals, through their daily practices and research, in producing ideal forms of care, best practices, and normative understandings about the skills, qualities, and abilities needed in care work; the connection between such efforts and various forms of inequality;

* The efforts of social movements, media outlets, or other social actors in naturalizing, challenging, or otherwise influencing medical knowledge and related healthcare practices;

* Contestation over understandings of illness and health;

* Efforts to decolonize medical knowledge or to form more inclusive communities of care.