hltb42h3 quiz

Post positivism

• Knowledge is shaped by context; challenges the idea of total objectivity.
  
  

Critical social science (field)

Exposes power, inequality, injustice, and aims for social change.

Disciplines:

Sociology (medical, criminology) & Anthropology (sociocultural, political).

Social Model of Health & Illness

Societal production and distribution, Social construction, Social organization

Societal production and distribution

Who gets sick and why — linked to inequality and social systems

Social construction

How meanings of illness are culturally produced.

Social organization (mills)

How care and responses are structured (hospitals, policy, institutions).

Sociological Imagination

• how personal struggles (like deviance) connect to bigger social systems.

Committing sociology

Historical – how past shapes present

Cultural – how biography/culture shape lives

Structural – how social organization affects people
Critical – how we might change or adapt structures

Contreras article summary (sociological imagination)

passage explains how researchers began to use fieldwork to better understand deviance, crime, and social life. Instead of just relying on numbers, surveys, or distant observations, they started going into real communities to observe people directly and talk to them about their lives. This helped them see that deviant behavior isn’t just random or “bad”; it often follows its own rules and makes sense within specific social settings.

Social theory

Organization of knowledge within which ideas and principles that we use in daily life (whether we realize it or not) shape our decisions about what we attend to, what we care
about, what questions we ask
→ Shaped by: biography, history, culture, structure.

Invisible Elbow (Charles Tilly):

Bureaucratic delays & inefficiencies → predictable inequality without intent. Example: welfare office errors create systemic disadvantage.

Waiting (Pierre Bourdieu):

= power and domination. Produces “ontological insecurity” — people unsure of their future or worth.

Work (Dorothy Smith):

• Any activity taking effort/time to maintain social systems (e.g., paperwork, care work).

Empirical research:

• Understanding the world through people’s daily living and working conditions.
  
  

Ethnography (auyero)

observing and talking to people in their everyday lives to understand how they experience the world.

How much weeks of learning

11 lectures / weeks

Krieger and Dave’s smith article

It's about how our bodies are a representation of the society we live in and shows the effects of

different social conditions. Things like our height, weight and nutrition is shaped by society depending

 If you live in poverty, have good housing. Embodiment -> social conditions get written into our bodies

Embodiment

how people’s bodies and personal lives are directly affected by systems of power. People “know” through lived experience.

Body

• Social, historical, and political vessel — not just biological. Health is shaped by context, not universality.

Jennifer Riggan article summary

she talks about her personal experience with infertility and how border restrictions affected her ability to get fertility treatment. Her story shows how her body and personal life were impacted by larger systems like immigration laws, medical policies, and government decisions. It’s not just about her private life — it’s about how governments have power over people’s bodies.

biopelitics

The way governments and institutions regulate people's lives, bodies and health to manage populations

summary of Riggan J. A love story

• The author lived in Eritrea during the Eritrea–Ethiopia war and saw how the conflict disrupted everyday life and cross-border identities.

• The war separated families, stopped travel, and made mixed Eritrean-Ethiopian identities dangerous.

• Her relationship with her Eritrean partner was affected by the conflict: he was conscripted, his family was deported, and their future became uncertain.

• They eventually married, but soon after, Eritrea became more restrictive, with intense state control and indefinite national service.

• The author uses her personal story to show how war and militarization reshape identity, mobility, and the boundaries between public and private life.

summary of (Mandatory hiv screening article by laura bisallion)

• how Canada’s mandatory HIV screening affects immigrant and refugee applicants, focusing on what happens during the immigration medical exam.

• Using institutional ethnography, the researcher shows how everyday experiences of HIV-positive applicants differ greatly from what official policy claims.

• Main arguments:

  1. Studying policy through people’s real-life experiences reveals its true effects.

  2. Mandatory HIV testing creates serious challenges for HIV-positive applicants that are socially produced and tied to wider political systems.

institutional ethnography

studies people’s daily experiences and then traces how those experiences are organized by rules, policies, texts, and institutions.

disturbing disjuncture

the disconnect between the official, text-based rules of the Canadian Immigration Medical
Examination (IME) and the on-the-ground experiences of HIV-positive
immigrant/refugee applicants.

 Non-Therapeutic Doctoring

Immigration doctors, who are state contractors and self-identified as “fact
finders” and “the guys in the trenches,” primarily work in state interests (detecting conditions that could render applicants inadmissible due to anticipated public health costs) rather than the applicants' subjective interests. The relationship is not a therapeutic one.

Ruling Relations

The complex of institutionally organized practices (e.g., texts, policies, bureaucracy)
that coordinate the activities of many people over wide stretches of time and space

disease

is the biomedical classification of a physiological condition

illness

the
subjective, lived experience of suffering and social impact of that condition.

Immigration medicine

• certain type of documenting, doctors role is to compose a medical file that excludes certain ppl 

• Sports doctors hired by players to help them

Disablism

Focus on excluding particular bodies, contrast to term ableism which is the valuing of bodies

Film about medical inadmissibility 

• immigrants being denied stay in Canada because of disabilities, or health issues 

• Being ostracized or looked down on