Social movements in health: an introduction

Abstract

Health social movements (HSMs) are an important political force concerning health access and quality of care, as well as for broader social change. We define HSMs as collective challenges to medical policy, public health policy and politics, belief systems, research and practice which include an array of formal and informal organisations, supporters, networks of cooperation and media. HSMs make many challenges to political power, professional authority and personal and collective identity. These movements address (a) access to, or provision of, health-care services; (b) disease, illness experience, disability and contested illness; and (c) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality.This introductory essay has three goals. First, we aim to explain why an entire volume on health social movements is warranted, by specifying the important analytical questions to be answered and by situating the volume in the midst of a growing interest in the topic among scholars from various sociological fields and even other disciplines. Second, we seek to offer an explanation for the phenomenon of health social movements generally, and more specifically what appears to be a recent growth in their presence and power in contemporary societies. We do this by noting the growing tendency across all movements to challenge authority structures, and by emphasising the ways in which HSMs challenge the authority of medicine, science, governments and corporations. Third, we further develop the concept of health social movements, and offer some conceptual tools that may be of use in reading the contributions to the volume, which we introduce in a manner that offers insight into the ways in which they advance our understanding of HSMs. Why and whence the focus on HSMs?In the last SHI Monograph, Health and Media , Clive Seale (2003) introduced the volume by pointing to the fact that media studies and the sociology of health and illness 'stand at a distance from one another'. Seale used the Monograph as a vehicle to bridge that gap. The same holds true for health social movements: many medical sociologists have studied such movements

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