Coordenadinators: David Tavares [ ESTeSL ] Amélia Augusto [ UBI ] Noémia Lopes [ EM-ISCS ]
The sociological analysis of health and illness is not only important because it aims questions that lie at the core of human existence – pain, suffering, death – but also because it allows to illustrate the ways how experiences of health and illness are to a great extent result of the way society is organized. The questions of health and illness are also questions related to inequalities, denials of citizenship, old and new power configurations, ethnocentrism and exclusions. The analysis and the understanding of the relations that people set with health and illness demands the understanding of the wider sociocultural context in which they occur, but also the consideration of their personal biography, the ways they produce and give meaning to their embodied experiences of illness and health care. Ultimately, it demands the full exercise of sociological imagination which enables us move between levels in order to grasp the multidimensionality and the complexity of these social phenomena, in an attempt to provide answers to the challenges that contemporary societies raise concerning its analysis and understanding.
Is this context, the sociological production in the field of health and illness has been focusing on a remarkable diversity of objects of study, problematics and theoretical, conceptual, epistemological and methodological debates.
The X Portuguese Sociological Congress to be held from 10 to 12 of July 2018 at University of Beira Interior (Covilhã) is a favorable space for the debate of the problematics addressed by the different studies carried out in Portugal in the field of sociology of health and illness. Therefore, the Thematic Section of Sociology of Health invites all interested in this field of knowledge to present papers based on concluded or ongoing research work or in exercises of theoretical and/or methodological reflections centered on specific themes.
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