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Purpose – The chapter examines the historical pattern of interconnections between drug policy, research, and treatment in light of recent theoretical developments in the medicalization thesis advanced in the sociology of medicine.

Methodology/approach – The chapter uses interpretive methods to examine how the social construction of addiction as a “chronic, relapsing brain disorder” converges with or diverges from the conceptual framework offered by sociological theorists of medicalization and biomedicalization.

Findings – The approach adopted shows how the meanings of the bio/medicalization of addiction shifted and circulated within and beyond the institutions developed to respond to drug addiction as a hybrid social, medical, and biomedical condition during the 20th century.

Social implications – Bio/medical frameworks for addiction are the outcome of historical attempts to influence public attitudes and develop effective methods to treat and prevent this “disease” in ways that would positively affect the quality of life of people living with addictions.

Originality/value – This original contribution addresses both strengths and limitations of bio/medical models, assessing how their influence has changed over time.

The chapter discusses the uniqueness of qualitative research that does not allow meeting the terms of consent as they are applied in traditional, positivist research with pre-defined goals that aim to validate hypotheses.

It is proposed adopting an ethics that promotes trust-based, reflective and dynamic relations between researchers and participants, centering on caring, humanity and concern. The suggested alternative approach views consent as an ongoing process that takes place throughout the entire course of the study; responsibility for protection of participants is expected of participants too, and is not the duty of researchers alone; mutuality must take place in the form of an ongoing, continuous dialogue; it is in order to consider fair recompense for participants too, thus reducing the one-sidedness of the research interest, and the chances that participants will decide to withdraw before completion of the study.

This chapter offers a comparative description of the separatist development of mainstream sociology focusing on sport-related phenomena versus the sociology of sport located within Human Movement or Sport Science departments at public universities in South Africa. Key findings relate to the production of fragmented bodies of knowledge, individual research agendas, and national funding in alignment with national development priorities that guide current neo-colonial knowledge production practices. There is a domination of political themes (pre- and post-apartheid) with more recent foci on nation building and Sport for Development and Peace which only partly respond to the call for indigenous knowledge production and critical scholarly work. The increased publications and mainstream sociological inquiry of the 2010 FIFA World Cup were not maintained as scholars continue to work in isolation. Other main sociological themes for both sectors include gender, with only a few established scholars producing critical work in response to a national call for an ‘Africanization’, anti-colonial stance in knowledge production. There seems to be an increasing trend to bridge the theory–practice divide and serve the public sphere which further pushes critical sociological work to the margins of both fields. The chapter provides a comparative analysis and critical overview of the development and current sociology of sport practices at public South African universities. It articulates the most significant discourses with global and local manifestations, and as such communicates key critical findings to guide strategic synergies and future sociological research.

Association Football (football) is currently recognised as the world's most popular women's sport (Andersson & Barker-Ruchti, 2019; Dunn & Welford, 2017). In this chapter, we build upon a Foucauldian-informed feminist body of work (e.g. Barker-Ruchti & Tinning, 2010; Liao & Markula, 2009; Markula, 2003) to analyse the impact of the ‘shift in approach and purpose’ in the women's game (Rosso, 2010). And, in doing so, seek to explore how the relations of power operating in the context of women's elite and professional football have changed over the last 20 years. Moreover, we consider the implications of these changes for both elite female players and those responsible for their development and welfare. To achieve our aim, we compare the experiences of two players (Christine and Maria, pseudonyms) from opposite ends of the last 20 years, all the while recognising that the partial and situated insights we provide in relation to these shifts are inevitably tied to the intersections of marginalised (female) and privileged (white, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle-class) subject positions.

Purpose – Over the last years, in the United States there has been significant increase in the consumption of pharmaceuticals for the treatment of mental disorders. More specifically, the number of clinical diagnosis of bipolar disorders in young people has increased by 40 times over the last 10 years. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the growth of bipolar disorder diagnosis using a sociological frame.

Methodology/approach – The methodology is based on the concepts proposed by the ‘conflictualist’ perspective of medical sociology. Medicalization, that is, the extension of medical categories in everyday life, is the main concept on which the chapter is constructed. The ‘syndromization’ of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lowers the threshold above which someone may be diagnosed with bipolarism. Moreover, advertisements push people to seek for pharmaceutical treatment for conditions of ‘normal’ sadness.

Findings – This work shows the importance of the analysis of ‘medical’ phenomena by approaches taken from social sciences. Bipolar disorder can be a terrible and painful disease, but it seems that there is the possibility that it is over-diagnosed.

Contribution to the field – In this epidemics of diagnosis of bipolar disorder it is central to integrate the medical perspective with other dimensions: the classification of mental disease, the advertisement for drugs and the cultural aspects of a given society.

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

This is a volume about gender, health and medicine broadly defined. It is based on the now widely-held assumption in the sociology of medicine that medicine and health are social constructions and that gender is an embedded part of them (see Lorber, 1997). The essays reveal that embedded with gender in the institution of medicine are race, class, and sexuality. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a critique of exclusively biomedical approaches to personal and public health and calls for more sociological input and qualitative research to help us understand aspects of health and illness. Among the recurrent themes in the seven essays are the medicalization of personal and social problems, the commodification of healthcare, and questions of agency, responsibility and control.

After their long deconstruction of the notion of culture, social sciences have set about deconstructing the idea of nature, considering it as a social representation with variations in time and in space. From this point of view, human reproduction is a particularly appropriate field of observation. Above and beyond the shared imaginary, in fact, nature does not (only) corresponds, at the empirical level, to biological data in human reproduction. As will we see in this chapter, what is thought to correspond to nature in relation to childbearing experience turns out to be something extremely sophisticated, with characteristics not unlike those of a cultural product. Based on the ethnographic research I carried out in one of the first maternity hospital in Italy to introduce natural childbirth, the chapter aims to add to the study of how nature is referred to in this model of birth, why is this category invoked and the extent to which its functions and contents have changed over time.

Sociologists have tended to construct theories of identity based on unitary notions of social location which avoid conceptualizing disjunction and contradiction and which therefore fail to capture certain characteristics of the postcolonial condition. This paper engages in a postcolonial re-reading of sociological theories of practice (in particular, Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus). It does so through an analysis of the historical development of the field of health and healing in South Africa. From the beginning of the colonial enterprise, biomedicine resisted amalgamation with other forms of healing and insisted on a monotherapeutic ideology and practice whereas indigenous healing accommodated not only biomedicine, but invited pluralism within and across cultural and ethnic differences. As such, a bifurcated and parallel system of healing emerged, whereby Black South Africans practiced pluralism and white South Africans utilized biomedicine in isolation. This disjuncture became acrimonious in the post-apartheid era as the state attempted to forge a united health system and battle the AIDS epidemic. Despite the historical and contemporary bifurcations within the field of health and healing, people living with AIDS continue to subscribe to a hybrid health ideology. There is, therefore, a structural disjuncture between the realities of consumption within the field of health and healing and the logic of the field as it is articulated in the symbolic struggle raging in the field of power. The field of health and healing is characterized, therefore, by a simultaneous bifurcation and hybridity – which is reflected in HIV-infected South Africans’ beliefs and practices. In order to make sense of this puzzling disjuncture and its impact on subjects’ trajectories of action, this paper draws insight from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and Homi Bhabha's conceptualization of hybridity – transforming each of them through their synthesis and application to the postcolonial context.