Committing Sociology: Being Healthy, Happy, and Up-High in St. James Town

There is a doggedly persistent, pervasive, and pernicious tendency to individualize ratherthan socialize problems. This is a discernable pattern that we see all around us,independent of any one particular social context. This collaboratively produced article isan example of and commitment to feminist praxis. We intentionally mobilize the “toolsof social science, friendship, and the power of conversation” (Mountz, 2016) to bring tolife ideas that Mehdia experienced for the first time in Laura’s undergraduate classroom.Specifically, she and fellow classmates, along with Maryam, learned how to cultivate andemploy their “sociological imagination” (Mills, 1959, 2000); connecting aspects ofbiography with materially arising social conditions. The aim of such inquiry is togenerate new insights and critically minded, contextually situated, and empiricallysupported explications for how things happen for and around us in the world we inhabit.In doing so, we are able to “sociologically reimagine” analysis by using visual modes ofinquiry and intentional “interdisciplinary entanglement” to blur the boundaries betweentraditional and so-called non-traditional modes of knowledge making (Jungnickel &Hjorth, 2014). We argue that the time is absolutely upon us to “commit sociology,”[1]and we offer this article as an intervention that does just this. [1] As per https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yT9dhHsKw

Decolonizing the U.S. Health Care System: Undocumented and Disabled after ACA

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) explicitly denies newly arrived documented and undocumented immigrants health insurance coverage, effectively making them the largest remaining uninsured segment of the U.S. population. Using mixed qualitative methods, our original research illustrates the health consequences experienced by uninsured, disabled undocumented immigrants as they navigate what they describe as an apartheid health care system. Critiquing the notion of immigrants as “public charges” or burdens on the system, our qualitative analysis focuses on Houston Health Action, a community-based organization led by and for undocumented, low-income disabled immigrants in Houston, Texas. Engaging a critical migration and critical disabilities studies framework, we use this valuable case to highlight contemporary contradictions in health care and immigration legislation and the embodied consequences of the intersecting oppressions of race, ability, immigration status, and health care access

Fragmentation and hierarchies in Argentina’s maternal health services as barriers to access, continuity and comprehensiveness of care

This paper aims to uncover the ways in which institutional regulations of maternal care services offered by the public health system in Argentina generate various forms of fragmentation and hierarchical organization that create barriers to access, continuity, and comprehensiveness of care. The conceptual and methodological tools of institutional ethnography are used as a guide for analysis of interviews with women and health agents from a province of the country’s Western region, as well as participant observation at regional hospitals and local health centers. The barriers identified and analyzed are related to regulations of time(s), space(s), and hierarchies among the health professions involved in service provision related to maternal health.Keywords: maternal health; institutional ethnography; institutional time; institutional space; hierarchies; pregnancy; Argentina; public healthcar

Who benefits from hospital birth? Perceptions of medicalised pregnancy and childbirth among Andean migrants in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia

This paper uses ethnographic data on reproductive experiences of indigenous Andean migrant women in the lowland eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra as a starting point for discussion of different perspectives on the efforts of the Bolivian state to biomedicalise the processes of pregnancy and childbirth. Pregnant women and babies up to six months of age are covered by the state-funded Universal Mother-Infant Insurance (SUMI) that favours the use of biomedical facilities over the services of traditional midwives that are not covered by the insurance. Unlike in the western Andean highlands of Bolivia, most women in Santa Cruz give birth in hospitals while actively negotiating their options. They are not motivated by strictly medical factors as social or economic circumstances also come into play. Simultaneously, the increased levels of hospital deliveries in Bolivia translate into decreased levels of maternal and perinatal mortality, which in turn help Bolivian statistics to fare better from the point of view of the government and international bodies, such as the WHO. However, the restrictions on qualifying for SUMI are such that women in Santa Cruz are often forced to meet the costs of medical services themselves. I argue that the initial socio-biomedical intention of SUMI has become obscured by its political impact. Keywords: biomedicalization; traditional medicine; migration; childbirth; Santa Cruz de la Sierra; indigenous peoples