Numerous guidelines aim to support inclusive approaches to conducting research with LGBTQIA+ people. Implementing these in practice, however, requires deliberate consideration of the situated social and cultural contexts that shape research (co-)design, participant recruitment, data collection and analysis. This commentary considers the imperative to foster a culture of inclusive research and practice with LGBTQIA+ populations through a higher education initiative to develop more equitable, transdisciplinary research: the UNSW Community of Practice for Inclusive Research with Queer and Trans people and people with Innate variations of sex characteristics, or 'CoPQTI'. This community of practice provides a robust model for creating a safe and supportive professional environment to enact high-quality, ethical, and accurate research within higher education contexts. In some international jurisdictions, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies are increasing or emerging that threaten to undermine the possibility for rigorous LGBTQIA+ research, which directly impacts the health and wellbeing of these communities and how they are discursively constructed in research practices. Proactive collaborations that seek to embed inclusivity as a normative research practice are needed more than ever.
Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) emphasises dignity, autonomy, and compassion as universal rights, yet its practical enactment within highly medicalised, standardised, and multicultural systems remains complex. This study aimed to explore how RMC is enacted by women and obstetricians, nurses, and midwives in hospital-based maternity care in Singapore. A qualitative exploratory study involving in-depth semi-structured interviews with mothers and healthcare providers was conducted. Mothers with maternity experience within the last 48 months were included regardless of parity (number of previous pregnancies). Healthcare providers were included if they had worked within the maternity setting within the last 4 years. Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis approach was used to develop themes and subthemes. We found that concepts of RMC, particularly autonomy, were interpreted differently by mothers and providers. Though nurse-midwives were intermediaries for respectful care, providers were operating within the constraints of protocol-driven efficiency within a technocratic society with norms of deference to authority. Mothers demonstrated situated agency by drawing on informal networks and using payment tiers to secure more relational care. However, this market-based differentiation risks commodifying dignity and deepening inequities in RMC based on the ability to pay. Systems need to integrate relational autonomy and informed choice to improve respectful maternity care practices.
Infrastructures fundamentally shape sexual health, but their gaps and failings often only come into view during moments of crisis. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a looming microbiological and global societal crisis, and one that is posing increasing challenges and risks for medical practice and public health alike. In sexual health, concerns have been raised about growing resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae and the less well-known Mycoplasma genitalium. In this article, we examine contemporary sexual health infrastructures and their adequacy in the context of rising antibiotic-resistant STIs. To do this, we draw on 49 semi-structured interviews with cisgender gay and bisexual men, and trans and gender diverse people (GBTQ+) in Australia. Findings reveal that growing costs, a lack of access to sexual healthcare services, complexities in navigating these services and lengthy wait times all present challenges to optimal care, and that growing resistance may further strain these socio-material-temporal arrangements. We argue that greater investment in sexual health infrastructures will increase capacity to accommodate complex lives, multiple subjectivities and ensure easier access to services. In the context of resistance, this frames sexual health infrastructures beyond ideas of simply 'coping with crisis' to being able to care well for people within a shifting environment.
Menstruation is not only a biological process but also an emotional and sociocultural phenomenon. Understanding it requires attention to lived experiences and to the scholarly narratives that represent them. This paper adopts a reflexive approach to examine how emotions mediate menstrual stigma by conducting a secondary thematic analysis of two systematic qualitative reviews - one focused on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the other on high-income countries (HICs). Drawing on over 180 studies across 51 countries, I analyse not only the patterns reported but also the epistemic lenses through which these patterns are constructed. While emotions such as shame, fear, and embarrassment appear across both contexts, the reviews frame them through different classificatory schemes, such as taboos, secrecy, and internalised stigma or gender norms, that reflect distinct epistemic cultures rather than inherent cultural differences. By tracing how these categories are produced through layered processes of interpretation and disciplinary framings, the analysis highlights the need to resist the essentialization of LMICs/HICs differences. Emotions thus provide a critical lens not only for understanding menstrual stigma but also for examining the production of knowledge about it.
Over the last decade, LGBTQ health has emerged as a distinct subcategory within Australian public health systems, evidenced by the development of LGBTQ health strategies by most state and territory governments. These strategies have arisen from decades of strategic advocacy on the part of government advisors, public servants, LGBTQ health organisations and advocates. This article is an analysis of Australian state and territory LGBTQ health strategies, published between 2019 and 2022. Along with overall analysis of their position within the formation and government of LGBTQ health, I pay particular attention to the historiographies they tell, their various commitments to epidemiological data collection, and how they constitute LGBTQ people as belonging to the imagined 'public' of public health. Through these examinations, I argue that LGBTQ health is a project of biocitizenship that makes possible certain forms of public recognition and the attention of public health systems but at the cost of narrowing focus towards the subjects, publics and problems legible and governable within the problem space of health and illness.
This commentary uses an anticolonial lens to critically evaluate the extant body of evidence on Indigenous LGBTQIASB+ peoples' health and wellbeing in so-called Australia. Scholarship in this field is relatively new; however, it has grown exponentially over the past five years across diverse disciplines including Criminology, Geography, Psychology, Medicine and Sociology. This commentary will summarise key emergent themes on health and wellbeing within the evidence base highlighting the status and direction of current research. The authors argue that the current body of scholarship has the potential to influence theoretical approaches such as Indigenous Standpoint Theory, Intersectionality, and Health and Wellbeing paradigms.
While our relationships with eating and drinking are thought to have undergone a period of disenchantment during industrialisation, some sociologists suggest a re-enchantment is taking hold. This paper explores the reflexive affectivity of wilderness on food and beverage marketing in consideration of persistent cultural tensions such as planetary decline, risk, freedom, and time pressures. Using social practice theories and semiotics, we examined significations of wilderness within a combined dataset of children's snack and alcohol product labels (n = 78). We describe icons and symbols used to portray wilderness, then apply sociological theories to explore the affective commodities these 'wild things' might enable. We suggest wilderness can open reflexive navigation of three affective tensions: (1) domesticated/untamed; (2) romantic/colonial; and (3) nostalgic/convenient. Empirically applying semiotics supported explorations of shared meanings within practices involving eating and drinking. Findings show how reflexive negotiation of affective tensions is shaped by commercial power and sociopolitical conditions within social practices. We suggest meanings of wilderness might sustain specific affects within various social practices, particularly those that balance cultural constructions of responsibility and freedom with the vexed nature of affective resistance to industrial food systems while still being inside them.
This paper examines the dynamic interplay between norms, practices, and food environments through the concept of 'normal food practices'. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem's theory of vital norms and social practice theory, we distinguish between descriptive (common), evaluative (proper), and creative (norm-generating) dimensions of food practices. We argue that food-related behaviors are not only shaped by existing norms but also actively produce new ones in response to environmental, technological, and socio-political conditions. We develop three empirical case studies that illustrate how norms are negotiated and transformed: playful resistance to food restrictions in hotel quarantine, decolonial food growing in settler-colonial Australia, and contested norms of purity and care in automated food systems. These examples reveal how food practices mediate agency, belonging, and health, challenging disciplinary models of biopolitical governance. We conclude in arguing that normal food practices are not fixed but are continually enacted and reshaped through everyday actions, offering new possibilities for ethical and political engagement with food.
Australian Aboriginal children have higher sugar intake and are disproportionately affected by sugar-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and dental caries than non-Aboriginal children. The intention of this paper was to highlight the need for approaches that can capture the complexity of health practices without reducing them to either individual choice or structural determination. We explore sugar consumption in Aboriginal children from a social practice perspective. Here, the unit of analysis is the practice, not the individual, where the elements of a social practice (competence, materials and meanings) are integrated into its performance. We conducted qualitative research using elements of focused ethnography with Aboriginal families in Western Australia to offer an alternative understanding of sugar and Aboriginal children's health. Findings highlight specific practices related to sugar consumption, indicating different social contexts: shopping with children, treats and rewards and family sporting participation. This reflects a complex system of interconnected practices, suggesting more insight is needed to understand the nature and complexity of influences on practices to design more successful policies and interventions. Reframing Aboriginal children's health within a social practice context may assist in mitigating the effects of sugar consumption and offer a different perspective on influencing factors.
ABSTRACTPeople develop their own ways of enriching the healthiness and tastiness of certain foods, or of their diet, overall. This is often pursued through trial and error, which in this context involves trying, eating, assessing, reflecting, then trying again. Trial and error involves sensory learning, embodied know-how and routinised engagements with information sources such as recipes and social media, as well as with friends and family, and health professionals. Individual instances of trial and error vary, but it is recognisable as a social practice. More specifically, this paper argues that trial and error is a dispersed practice. As such, it supports adaptation, improvisation, insight and information-seeking within other food and health practices. To examine trial and error as a practice, this paper shares findings from a qualitative study of rural and urban Canadians' everyday food lives. The study, through ethnographic techniques such as video tours, explored how people become and stay informed about food. Findings illuminate how trial and error bolsters and connects related food and information practices, and shapes their evolution over time.
This paper explores the paradox between middle-class consumers' understanding of healthy eating and their actual food practices which often contradict to their knowledge, in the middle-sized Chinese city of Kunming. Based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted across various food consumption settings and in-depth interviews, the study examines how middle-class consumers navigate tensions between aspirations for healthy eating and the realities of modern life. Drawing on social practice theory, it investigates how materialities, competences, and social meanings collectively shape food behaviours, complicating efforts to actualise healthy and sustainable consumption. Unlike international studies suggesting that raising environmental consciousness or promoting health-related knowledge directly leads to sustainable and more nutritional food choices (Hansmann, R., & Binder, C. R. (2020). Determinants of different types of positive environmental behaviors: An analysis of public and private sphere actions. Sustainability, 12(20), 8547; Jaiswal and Aagja, 2024), this research reveals that middle-class consumers in Kunming were equipped with substantial knowledge about healthy diets but struggled to enact these ideals due to competing demands, temporal, and socio-material constraints.
The mass migration to social media for nutrition advice has amplified the health risks of false or decontextualised information. Existing countermeasures such as fact-checking, boosting media literacy and behavioural 'nudges' treat the problem as one of cognitive vulnerabilities. Yet everyday interactions with social media, like scrolling, liking and posting, are mostly practices guided by platform design and social rewards. This conceptual paper reframes nutrition-related misinformation (NRM) through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice. We show how the online field of digital food cultures, the capital of likes, follows and sponsorships, and an embodied digital habitus together normalise sensational, influencer-led content while marginalising evidence-based voices. Bringing disparate literatures on NRM, digital food cultures and practice theory into conversation, we map the specific mechanisms that embed misinformation in users' routines - parasocial intimacy, affective storytelling and algorithmic amplification. Recognising practice as the unit of analysis reveals why cognition-focused remedies deliver only modest, context-dependent gains. We propose practice-level interventions that seek to disrupt the field of social media through the voices of resistant health professionals and developing a resistant habitus among users of social media sites.
Online food delivery platforms (OFPs) are reshaping food consumption across Southeast Asia, with Indonesia at the forefront due in part to its rapidly expanding digital economy. Longstanding public health campaigns such as 4 Sehat 5 Sempurna (4 Healthy 5 Perfect) have historically shaped national understandings of nutrition in Indonesia. At the same time, a growing urban middle-class is increasingly adopting globalised lifestyle-oriented concerns around food hygiene, body weight and 'wellness'. The growing use of OFPs by many middle-class households has introduced new tensions between traditional health ideals and convenience-driven digital food practices. Drawing on an ethnographic study of households in Surabaya, this article combines Social Practice Theory (SPT) with the concept of multiple modernities to examine how health, hygiene and food provisioning are negotiated across diverse temporalities, infrastructures, socio-economic contexts and cultural beliefs and practices. It examines how households navigate competing demands of time, taste, intergenerational preferences and trust, while engaging with a diverse provisioning landscape that includes wet markets, local warungs (small family-owned eateries), supermarkets and platform-based food options. By situating these dynamics within Surabaya's layered urban modernities, the article contributes to broader debates about digital food consumption and shifting and emergent health practices in the Global South context.
The ubiquity of negative childbirth experiences, and their repercussions, are gaining increased global attention. 'Humanizing birth' principles, developed by social science and midwifery scholars, promote relationship-based care tailored to women/birthing people's needs. Midwives play a vital role in birth experiences, but little is known about how they form their perspectives on and capacities to facilitate humanized birth. To address this gap, this study analyses Australian midwives' and students' views of a good birth, a good midwife, and the factors assisting or preventing them facilitating humanized birth experiences. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews elicited participants' (n = 23) perspectives. Participants consistently articulate a specialized midwifery approach and knowledge base aligning strongly with humanizing birth principles. However, they describe having their expertise dismissed within the hospital-based birth system, thus prevented from practicing according to these principles and the evidence base. We argue this constitutes epistemic injustice, with testimonial injustice occurring when midwives'/students' knowledge is wrongly overridden by others with higher status in the professional hierarchy, and hermeneutical injustice perpetuated by epistemic assumptions built into the healthcare system itself. Unable to deploy their expertise, midwives experience epistemic stress and are driven to leave the mainstream birth system, further diminishing the possibilities of humanizing birth.
There is increasing impetus to help individuals navigate health and social care systems. Though the development and effectiveness of navigator roles have long been explored in health and sociological research, evaluations of navigation are typically narrow in focus and oriented to individual outcomes, quantitative metrics, or barriers and enablers in implementation. Investigating the structural effects of navigation, especially across disparate contexts and sectors, presents significant challenges for researching navigation. To explore these challenges, this article presents a critical interpretive synthesis of qualitative literature on navigation spanning health and social care. Twenty qualitative studies were included, with analysis organised across four themes: (1) modalities of navigation practice; (2) epistemic authority and professional identity; (3) authorising navigation in and through place; (4) situating navigation and its effects in systems. We conceptualise navigation as operating via dual modalities of structural and interpretative practice, and argue this conceptualisation facilitates closer critical attention to the relational and situated practices often obscured in accounts of navigators' work. We also highlight a need for strengthened research designs that reflect the complexities of care systems and consider the effects of navigation across multiple sectors. We finally reflect on emerging challenges posed by digital and algorithmic tools in navigation.
A long-standing debate in agrifood sociological work explores how consumer attitudes and behaviours regarding food consumption contribute to healthy food systems. This debate is particularly evident in the study of Alternative Local Food Systems (ALFS), where the potential of 'ethical consumption' to reorient food production-consumption relationships and improve human and ecological health, including food security, remains a subject of ongoing inquiry. Individual consumption from systems of alternative forms of food production (organics, agroecology) and distribution (cooperatives, food hubs) reflect changing consumer values and practices towards sustainable diets. This paper contributes to health sociology by taking a theoretical approach to this debate and drawing on scholarship exploring the relationship between ethical consumption and systems transformation. By examining how different consumption theories (ethical, sustainable, green and political) grapple with the individual-collective dilemma, it offers insights into the determinants of health by demonstrating how ethical consumption, ranging from individual values to collective activism, can influence access to heathy food and ultimately shape health outcomes. It also examines ALFS' contributions to promote collective modes of consumption. This sheds light on how collective agency might prompt deeper food democratic shifts beyond individual consumption, potentially supporting healthy and sustainable diets.
While the discourse on care is largely pessimistic, brilliance happens, demonstrated by instances when care exceeded expectation. To advance brilliant care scholarship, this article asks, what are the domains that enable it? Through a reflexive analysis of ten publications on brilliant care, four domains were constructed and justified - namely: a relational orientation to care; attentive engagement; working with and beyond the technical aspects of healthcare; and shared responsibility. This article concludes with an invitation to those who receive, deliver, manage, develop policies that are relevant to, or conduct research on health service management - namely, to consider how these domains can be improved and how they can be systematised and translated into policy and practice, without compromising their dynamic quality.
Sociologists are increasingly interested in exploring the role of time in relation to illness, disability, and care. However, the question of how individuals experience and navigate the temporal dimensions of sleep in their everyday and everynight lives requires further empirical research. The present study addresses this question using in-depth semi-structured interviews with 66 employed midlife Israelis from diverse sociodemographic backgrounds. The findings indicate that sleep experiences are shaped by a complex interplay of biological, social, and seasonal rhythms. Sleep patterns recur nightly, weekly, seasonally, and following major life events and transitions, combining to create what I call sleepscapes - the evolving rhythmic patterns and disruptions that characterise the lived dynamics of sleep throughout a person's lifecourse. The study underscores the concept of polyrhythmia - multiple rhythms - in everyday and everynight life and shows how various rhythms can either harmonise or clash, often co-producing each other. The study explores individuals' efforts to negotiate these rhythms, illustrating how all these processes profoundly impact human experiences, social relationships, and health.
The health implications of prolonged wildfire smoke exposure - such as that seen during the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires - are a major concern in public health, not only in Australia but in many fire-prone areas globally. One group identified as potentially more susceptible to smoke exposure than the general population are pregnant women. Based on a study of how pregnant women and parents with newborn babies experienced the bushfire smoke event in Canberra and the NSW southeast coast, the paper examines how the placenta was figured across two domains during this time. The first domain considers how the placenta became prominent in the context of public and medical concerns about the immediate and long-term impacts of the bushfire smoke, focusing on pregnant women as a 'vulnerable' population. Secondly, we explore how the placenta figured in the narratives of women in our study: how they imagined their bodies responding to smoke exposure and how the smoke made more visible the interiority of their bodies. We argue that these narratives illustrate how environmental crises can reshape experiences of (pregnant) embodiment, imaginaries of future health, and our place in an increasingly uncertain world.
