Christian Bröer
Biographic Data
| ID | 223470 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Bröer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Bröer |
| SIGNATURE | BRÖER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6381-0233 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 108 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Methodology-as-process
This article engages with the persistent methodological challenge of balancing between blueprinting and flexibility, between pre-designed structure and responsiveness to the field. Although repeatedly acknowledged by qualitative methodologists, practical guidance on managing this balance remains limited. This is highly problematic, especially in contexts that amplify the challenge: large-scale, collaborative, comparative research. While these cir…
Voices of youth
Taking the time to build trust and create a feeling of equality is important. It is also important to allow youth to take the lead when they wish so and have clear ideas of how to do so. Voices of rebelliousness can be a show of strength and help reach the goals of the project. Participation in CO-CREATE may have contributed toward individual empowerment of youth
Bogeymen," "Murderers," and "Loonies
Scientific advice is often solicited in governance, yet it is increasingly challenged in the public domain. Public participation is often suggested to mediate opposing knowledge claims, but it has not resolved crises of expertise and democracy. While Science and Technology Studies (STS) has increasingly focused on emotions in controversies, participation literature remains silent about their role. This study of the Dutch debate on 5G and health, …
Democratising participatory health promotion
Public policy aimed at preventing undesired phenomena has increasingly sought to engage representatives of the target population. Little is known, however, about how power dynamics function to shape the processes and outcomes of risk governance engagement interventions. In order to study the ways in which, and the extent to which, power differentials can be reduced in participatory health promotion initiatives, we develop a conceptual framework s…
Negotiating policy ideas
Between 2019 and 2021, 199 adolescents collaborated with adults in 15 participatory action research projects, called Youth Alliances, to contribute to system-directed obesity prevention in five EU countries. We investigated if and how these Youth Alliances included diverse youth, enhanced engagement, generated policy proposals and changed problem perception. We assessed the Youth Alliances from a micro-sociological perspective of negotiated order…
Agency through medicalization
From Danger to Uncertainty
Based on ongoing longitudinal research in families with young children, we investigate parents’ changing everyday experiences and health care practices of dealing with COVID-19 policies in the Netherlands from March to June 2020. We identify four key themes developing over time. In relation to evolving COVID-19 prevention policies, (a) the lockdown interrupted life and experiences of temporality. (b) Following the lockdown, risk management change…
Medicalization and manhood
Although mental health diagnoses and treatments are spreading across the globe, most medicalization research originates from the Global North, where diagnosis and treatment are well institutionalized. In this article, we examine the earliest possible emergence of ADHD diagnosis and treatment in the context of Ghanaian boys' transition towards manhood. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among boys from different class backgrounds in Accra in 2017, we…
Negotiating ADHD
Although a growing number of studies have demonstrated differences in responses to ADHD-like behaviours, very few studies have focused on theorizing diversity in the way ADHD is framed and approached globally. To contribute to the study of medicalization in a global context, this study examines the discursive field in which care professionals explain and treat ADHD among children in metropolitan India and addresses the need for an analytic framew…
We Are Here! Claim-making and Claim-placing of Undocumented Migrants in Amsterdam
Through everyday practices, excluded and marginalised undocumented migrants struggle for citizenship, question bordering practices, and can achieve forms of inclusion incrementally. Based on an ethnographic case study in Amsterdam, this article evidences and theorises these piecemeal struggles of undocumented migrants. We show how undocumented migrants—discursively and spatially—claim ‘the right to have rights’. We demonstrate how forms of inclus…
From danger to uncertainty
Based on ongoing longitudinal research in families with young children, we investigate parents' changing everyday experiences and healthcare practices of dealing with COVID-19 policies in the Netherlands from March until June 2020. We identify four key themes developing over time. In relation to evolving Covid-19 prevention policies 1) the lockdown interrupted life and experiences of temporality. 2) Following the lockdown, risk management changed…
Family health competence
During the first years of a baby's life, parents develop ways of caring that affect the child's health later in life. In this paper, we focus on eating and sleeping, as social practices that mediate between socioeconomic and cultural conditions and health outcomes, such as weight status. We argue for an analysis of what we call 'family health competence', meaning emerging know-hows and resources relevant to healthy living produced, embodied and s…
Governance and risk in everyday life
This paper uses multi-level longitudinal mixed-methods to map changes in citizens’ experiences of technological risks and asks if these are influenced by risk governance. We focus on the uncertain health risks of mobile phone cell sites. We quantitatively survey a national level panel of citizens in the Netherlands and make use of mixed-method panels of citizens who are being confronted with siting practices in the Netherlands and Southern Califo…
Rituals of recognition
Recent decades have witnessed mounting attention to the theme of recognition, both in public policy and in the academic world. Scholarly debate on recognition is dominated by philosophers, while the policy debate is dominated by political and educational perspectives. A sociological perspective has scarcely been developed. In this article, we approach recognition as a sociological phenomenon with the aid of Collins’ theory of Interaction Ritual C…
Sadness or depression
Engaging citizens
This article puts forward an interactionist discourse approach for studying the course of local political protest. We argue that how local policy-makers engage with the (anticipated) demands of citizens and mediate national policy produces distinct framing and feeling rules about potentially controversial issues. These framing and feeling rules open up or close down opportunities for citizen concerns to develop into collective action and policy c…
How health risks prevention shapes collective identities
Sociological theories of health risks in late modernity emphasise the individualisation and increasing anxiety that results from prevention policies, while bio-sociality theories point to the creation of new, biologically or medically based social identities. In this article, we outline an alternative approach. We use micro-sociological interaction ritual theory to examine how health risk prevention technology shape interactions that generate col…
Biomedical risks and citizenship
Cell phone technology has become a ubiquitous quasi-utility worldwide. Meanwhile, controversies around its health risks are continually emerging in locations around the world. In this paper, we argue that the ongoing controversy is primarily the effect of practices that are trying to govern cell site risks, rather than inherent uncertainties or qualities of the technology. We understand this as a process of medicalization that engenders bio-citiz…
Risk policies and risk perceptions
This paper explores the influence that health risk policies have on the citizens’ perceptions of those health risks. Previously, detailed mixed methods research revealed that noise annoyance policies shaped noise perception. This idea is now applied to nine different environmental health risks in six European countries. When attention is given to a risk in policy, peoples’ concerns about that risk are assumed to be amplified or shaped. To assess …
Pretenders and performers
How do professionals respond to the commodification of health care? Using an interactionist perspective, we answer this question by referring to the findings of five qualitative studies of hospital surgeons, mental health-care professionals, emergency and ambulance personnel, and youth workers in the Netherlands. We find that differential levels of professional autonomy, dominance and discretion spawn different combinations of the logics of the m…
Too Ashamed to Complain
This article examines how Dutch citizens with long-term care needs have used existing legal opportunities to respond to cuts in publicly financed care. Unexpectedly, most did not make use of their right to appeal the reduction or elimination of their previous entitlements, even when this led to marked problems in daily life. Thirty interviews with disabled and elderly persons and their care-givers revealed that specific social norms on how to fee…
Neurobiology in public and private discourse
How do people describe their health? How do their descriptions relate to public definitions? This article focuses on adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We look at Dutch adults who adopt the ADHD label and ask: which discourses structure their descriptions of ADHD? How do these relate to the dominant public discourse on ADHD? Do people use, for example, neurobiological explanations of ADHD? The research makes use of Q-methodolo…
‘We are the canary in a coal mine’
This paper analyses the process of establishing a risk object – electromagnetic fields. This example will be used to examine risk categorisation as such, and to explore how individual and collective attempts to establish a new risk interact with health policy. We studied people who claim to suffer from electro-hypersensitivity. We conducted participant observation and repeated interviews with 18 electro-hypersensitivity sufferers, and interviewed…
Discursive Opportunities, Feeling Rules, and the Rise of Protests Against Aircraft Noise
Social movement researchers propose different ways to incorporate meaning into structural approaches, notably into political opportunity structure (POS) theory. In this article we further develop one of the recent attempts to do so: discursive opportunity structure theory (DOS) as proposed by Koopmans and Olzak. We pay particular attention to the role of feelings. Although the DOS model correctly points toward the discursive construction of polit…
Aircraft noise and risk politics1
Air mobility spans most of the globe, but its side effects are concentrated in relatively small localities. In this paper aircraft noise annoyance is interpreted from the perspective of risk society theory as described by Ulrich Beck. With the increase in air mobility, side effects like noise nuisance gradually dominate the air mobility discussions. The logic of wealth distribution is thereby replaced by the logic of risk distribution. General an…
Discursive Opportunities, Feeling Rules, and the Rise of Protests Against Aircraft Noise
Social movement researchers propose different ways to incorporate meaning into structural approaches, notably into political opportunity structure (POS) theory. In this article we further develop one of the recent attempts to do so: discursive opportunity structure theory (DOS) as proposed by Koopmans and Olzak. We pay particular attention to the role of feelings. Although the DOS model correctly points toward the discursive construction of polit…
Neurobiology in public and private discourse
How do people describe their health? How do their descriptions relate to public definitions? This article focuses on adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We look at Dutch adults who adopt the ADHD label and ask: which discourses structure their descriptions of ADHD? How do these relate to the dominant public discourse on ADHD? Do people use, for example, neurobiological explanations of ADHD? The research makes use of Q-methodolo…
Sadness or depression
Too Ashamed to Complain
This article examines how Dutch citizens with long-term care needs have used existing legal opportunities to respond to cuts in publicly financed care. Unexpectedly, most did not make use of their right to appeal the reduction or elimination of their previous entitlements, even when this led to marked problems in daily life. Thirty interviews with disabled and elderly persons and their care-givers revealed that specific social norms on how to fee…
We Are Here! Claim-making and Claim-placing of Undocumented Migrants in Amsterdam
Through everyday practices, excluded and marginalised undocumented migrants struggle for citizenship, question bordering practices, and can achieve forms of inclusion incrementally. Based on an ethnographic case study in Amsterdam, this article evidences and theorises these piecemeal struggles of undocumented migrants. We show how undocumented migrants—discursively and spatially—claim ‘the right to have rights’. We demonstrate how forms of inclus…
Negotiating ADHD
Although a growing number of studies have demonstrated differences in responses to ADHD-like behaviours, very few studies have focused on theorizing diversity in the way ADHD is framed and approached globally. To contribute to the study of medicalization in a global context, this study examines the discursive field in which care professionals explain and treat ADHD among children in metropolitan India and addresses the need for an analytic framew…
Family health competence
During the first years of a baby's life, parents develop ways of caring that affect the child's health later in life. In this paper, we focus on eating and sleeping, as social practices that mediate between socioeconomic and cultural conditions and health outcomes, such as weight status. We argue for an analysis of what we call 'family health competence', meaning emerging know-hows and resources relevant to healthy living produced, embodied and s…
Pretenders and performers
How do professionals respond to the commodification of health care? Using an interactionist perspective, we answer this question by referring to the findings of five qualitative studies of hospital surgeons, mental health-care professionals, emergency and ambulance personnel, and youth workers in the Netherlands. We find that differential levels of professional autonomy, dominance and discretion spawn different combinations of the logics of the m…
Medicalization and manhood
Although mental health diagnoses and treatments are spreading across the globe, most medicalization research originates from the Global North, where diagnosis and treatment are well institutionalized. In this article, we examine the earliest possible emergence of ADHD diagnosis and treatment in the context of Ghanaian boys' transition towards manhood. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among boys from different class backgrounds in Accra in 2017, we…
Governance and risk in everyday life
This paper uses multi-level longitudinal mixed-methods to map changes in citizens’ experiences of technological risks and asks if these are influenced by risk governance. We focus on the uncertain health risks of mobile phone cell sites. We quantitatively survey a national level panel of citizens in the Netherlands and make use of mixed-method panels of citizens who are being confronted with siting practices in the Netherlands and Southern Califo…
Engaging citizens
This article puts forward an interactionist discourse approach for studying the course of local political protest. We argue that how local policy-makers engage with the (anticipated) demands of citizens and mediate national policy produces distinct framing and feeling rules about potentially controversial issues. These framing and feeling rules open up or close down opportunities for citizen concerns to develop into collective action and policy c…
Agency through medicalization
Rituals of recognition
Recent decades have witnessed mounting attention to the theme of recognition, both in public policy and in the academic world. Scholarly debate on recognition is dominated by philosophers, while the policy debate is dominated by political and educational perspectives. A sociological perspective has scarcely been developed. In this article, we approach recognition as a sociological phenomenon with the aid of Collins’ theory of Interaction Ritual C…
Biomedical risks and citizenship
Cell phone technology has become a ubiquitous quasi-utility worldwide. Meanwhile, controversies around its health risks are continually emerging in locations around the world. In this paper, we argue that the ongoing controversy is primarily the effect of practices that are trying to govern cell site risks, rather than inherent uncertainties or qualities of the technology. We understand this as a process of medicalization that engenders bio-citiz…
Aircraft noise and risk politics1
Air mobility spans most of the globe, but its side effects are concentrated in relatively small localities. In this paper aircraft noise annoyance is interpreted from the perspective of risk society theory as described by Ulrich Beck. With the increase in air mobility, side effects like noise nuisance gradually dominate the air mobility discussions. The logic of wealth distribution is thereby replaced by the logic of risk distribution. General an…
Discursive Opportunities, Feeling Rules, and the Rise of Protests Against Aircraft Noise
Social movement researchers propose different ways to incorporate meaning into structural approaches, notably into political opportunity structure (POS) theory. In this article we further develop one of the recent attempts to do so: discursive opportunity structure theory (DOS) as proposed by Koopmans and Olzak. We pay particular attention to the role of feelings. Although the DOS model correctly points toward the discursive construction of polit…
‘We are the canary in a coal mine’
This paper analyses the process of establishing a risk object – electromagnetic fields. This example will be used to examine risk categorisation as such, and to explore how individual and collective attempts to establish a new risk interact with health policy. We studied people who claim to suffer from electro-hypersensitivity. We conducted participant observation and repeated interviews with 18 electro-hypersensitivity sufferers, and interviewed…
Pretenders and performers
How do professionals respond to the commodification of health care? Using an interactionist perspective, we answer this question by referring to the findings of five qualitative studies of hospital surgeons, mental health-care professionals, emergency and ambulance personnel, and youth workers in the Netherlands. We find that differential levels of professional autonomy, dominance and discretion spawn different combinations of the logics of the m…
Too Ashamed to Complain
This article examines how Dutch citizens with long-term care needs have used existing legal opportunities to respond to cuts in publicly financed care. Unexpectedly, most did not make use of their right to appeal the reduction or elimination of their previous entitlements, even when this led to marked problems in daily life. Thirty interviews with disabled and elderly persons and their care-givers revealed that specific social norms on how to fee…
Neurobiology in public and private discourse
How do people describe their health? How do their descriptions relate to public definitions? This article focuses on adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We look at Dutch adults who adopt the ADHD label and ask: which discourses structure their descriptions of ADHD? How do these relate to the dominant public discourse on ADHD? Do people use, for example, neurobiological explanations of ADHD? The research makes use of Q-methodolo…
Risk policies and risk perceptions
This paper explores the influence that health risk policies have on the citizens’ perceptions of those health risks. Previously, detailed mixed methods research revealed that noise annoyance policies shaped noise perception. This idea is now applied to nine different environmental health risks in six European countries. When attention is given to a risk in policy, peoples’ concerns about that risk are assumed to be amplified or shaped. To assess …
How health risks prevention shapes collective identities
Sociological theories of health risks in late modernity emphasise the individualisation and increasing anxiety that results from prevention policies, while bio-sociality theories point to the creation of new, biologically or medically based social identities. In this article, we outline an alternative approach. We use micro-sociological interaction ritual theory to examine how health risk prevention technology shape interactions that generate col…
Biomedical risks and citizenship
Cell phone technology has become a ubiquitous quasi-utility worldwide. Meanwhile, controversies around its health risks are continually emerging in locations around the world. In this paper, we argue that the ongoing controversy is primarily the effect of practices that are trying to govern cell site risks, rather than inherent uncertainties or qualities of the technology. We understand this as a process of medicalization that engenders bio-citiz…
Engaging citizens
This article puts forward an interactionist discourse approach for studying the course of local political protest. We argue that how local policy-makers engage with the (anticipated) demands of citizens and mediate national policy produces distinct framing and feeling rules about potentially controversial issues. These framing and feeling rules open up or close down opportunities for citizen concerns to develop into collective action and policy c…
Sadness or depression
Rituals of recognition
Recent decades have witnessed mounting attention to the theme of recognition, both in public policy and in the academic world. Scholarly debate on recognition is dominated by philosophers, while the policy debate is dominated by political and educational perspectives. A sociological perspective has scarcely been developed. In this article, we approach recognition as a sociological phenomenon with the aid of Collins’ theory of Interaction Ritual C…
Governance and risk in everyday life
This paper uses multi-level longitudinal mixed-methods to map changes in citizens’ experiences of technological risks and asks if these are influenced by risk governance. We focus on the uncertain health risks of mobile phone cell sites. We quantitatively survey a national level panel of citizens in the Netherlands and make use of mixed-method panels of citizens who are being confronted with siting practices in the Netherlands and Southern Califo…
We Are Here! Claim-making and Claim-placing of Undocumented Migrants in Amsterdam
Through everyday practices, excluded and marginalised undocumented migrants struggle for citizenship, question bordering practices, and can achieve forms of inclusion incrementally. Based on an ethnographic case study in Amsterdam, this article evidences and theorises these piecemeal struggles of undocumented migrants. We show how undocumented migrants—discursively and spatially—claim ‘the right to have rights’. We demonstrate how forms of inclus…
From danger to uncertainty
Based on ongoing longitudinal research in families with young children, we investigate parents' changing everyday experiences and healthcare practices of dealing with COVID-19 policies in the Netherlands from March until June 2020. We identify four key themes developing over time. In relation to evolving Covid-19 prevention policies 1) the lockdown interrupted life and experiences of temporality. 2) Following the lockdown, risk management changed…
Family health competence
During the first years of a baby's life, parents develop ways of caring that affect the child's health later in life. In this paper, we focus on eating and sleeping, as social practices that mediate between socioeconomic and cultural conditions and health outcomes, such as weight status. We argue for an analysis of what we call 'family health competence', meaning emerging know-hows and resources relevant to healthy living produced, embodied and s…
From Danger to Uncertainty
Based on ongoing longitudinal research in families with young children, we investigate parents’ changing everyday experiences and health care practices of dealing with COVID-19 policies in the Netherlands from March to June 2020. We identify four key themes developing over time. In relation to evolving COVID-19 prevention policies, (a) the lockdown interrupted life and experiences of temporality. (b) Following the lockdown, risk management change…
Medicalization and manhood
Although mental health diagnoses and treatments are spreading across the globe, most medicalization research originates from the Global North, where diagnosis and treatment are well institutionalized. In this article, we examine the earliest possible emergence of ADHD diagnosis and treatment in the context of Ghanaian boys' transition towards manhood. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among boys from different class backgrounds in Accra in 2017, we…
Negotiating ADHD
Although a growing number of studies have demonstrated differences in responses to ADHD-like behaviours, very few studies have focused on theorizing diversity in the way ADHD is framed and approached globally. To contribute to the study of medicalization in a global context, this study examines the discursive field in which care professionals explain and treat ADHD among children in metropolitan India and addresses the need for an analytic framew…
Agency through medicalization
Negotiating policy ideas
Between 2019 and 2021, 199 adolescents collaborated with adults in 15 participatory action research projects, called Youth Alliances, to contribute to system-directed obesity prevention in five EU countries. We investigated if and how these Youth Alliances included diverse youth, enhanced engagement, generated policy proposals and changed problem perception. We assessed the Youth Alliances from a micro-sociological perspective of negotiated order…
Democratising participatory health promotion
Public policy aimed at preventing undesired phenomena has increasingly sought to engage representatives of the target population. Little is known, however, about how power dynamics function to shape the processes and outcomes of risk governance engagement interventions. In order to study the ways in which, and the extent to which, power differentials can be reduced in participatory health promotion initiatives, we develop a conceptual framework s…
Voices of youth
Taking the time to build trust and create a feeling of equality is important. It is also important to allow youth to take the lead when they wish so and have clear ideas of how to do so. Voices of rebelliousness can be a show of strength and help reach the goals of the project. Participation in CO-CREATE may have contributed toward individual empowerment of youth
Bogeymen," "Murderers," and "Loonies
Scientific advice is often solicited in governance, yet it is increasingly challenged in the public domain. Public participation is often suggested to mediate opposing knowledge claims, but it has not resolved crises of expertise and democracy. While Science and Technology Studies (STS) has increasingly focused on emotions in controversies, participation literature remains silent about their role. This study of the Dutch debate on 5G and health, …
Methodology-as-process
This article engages with the persistent methodological challenge of balancing between blueprinting and flexibility, between pre-designed structure and responsiveness to the field. Although repeatedly acknowledged by qualitative methodologists, practical guidance on managing this balance remains limited. This is highly problematic, especially in contexts that amplify the challenge: large-scale, collaborative, comparative research. While these cir…
Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (11 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Social science (7 works)