K Bell
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 16781 |
|---|---|
| NOME | K Bell |
| PRENOMES | K |
| SOBRENOME | Bell |
| ASSINATURA | BELL K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9008-4663 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 70 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 378 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 70 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1965 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
A Qualitative Ecological Exploration of Black Perinatal Mental Health and Wellbeing
Revisiting Robert Crawford's ‘Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life’
This special issue revisits Robert Crawford's influential 1980 paper ‘Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life’ to reassess its conceptual value for contemporary medical sociology. We show how healthism emerged from 1970s US struggles to reconcile behavioural risk, environmental determinants and political‐economic uncertainty, crystallising as an ideology that individualises responsibility while obscuring the social conditions of health.…
The best spin’
Anti-tobacco public health campaigns portray e-cigarettes and cigarettes as interchangeable nicotine-delivery systems, describing 'vapes' as a gateway to combustible tobacco use. Some vape users, however, portray vaping as producing a qualitatively different drug experience, describing the pursuit of fleeting, dizzy moments of intoxication sometimes described as 'head spins'. Recent anti-vape campaigns have seized upon the language of head spins,…
Reciprocity, moral accounting work and the limitations of the concept of altruism
The assumption that research participation should be altruistically motivated is an underlying tenet of contemporary research ethics. In recent years, there has also been growing empirical interest in the role of altruism in non-clinical research, based on a desire to improve study recruitment and retention rates in longitudinal studies, observational studies and biobanks. Drawing on a survey with 241 respondents taking part in a UK epidemiologic…
The social life of natural experiments in epidemiology and public health
Over the twentieth century, the concept of the natural experiment has become increasingly prominent across a variety of disciplines, albeit most consequentially in epidemiology and public health. Drawing on an analysis of the scientific and medical literature, we explore the social life of the natural experiment, tracing its changing use, meaning and uptake to better understand the work done by the concept. We demonstrate how the natural experime…
Moving on in uncertain times
Research ethics committees, ethnographers and imaginations of risk
Ethnographers' concerns about institutional ethics review are by now well-known and several hypotheses have been advanced to explain their complaints. Many have highlighted the lack of epistemological fit between ethnographic methods and ethics review paradigms. Others point to the existence of a "victim narrative" and suggest that circulating horror stories are unrepresentative of ethnographers' experiences, or argue that ethnographers' complain…
Scholarly Publishing, Boundary Processes, and the Problem of Fake Peer Reviews
Over the past decade, the phenomenon of "fake" peer reviews has caused growing consternation among scholarly publishers. Yet despite the significant behind-the-scenes impact that anxieties about fakery have had on peer review processes within scholarly journals, the phenomenon itself has been subject to little scholarly analysis. Rather than treating fake reviews as a straightforward descriptive category, in this article, we explore how the disco…
National propensities
Epidemic confusions
The movement to decolonise global health is gathering pace. In its concern with the fundamental, distal causes of inequality and its call for social justice, the decolonisation movement forces us to question how global health works, for whom, where it is located, its funding practices, power asymmetries, cultures of collaboration and publication. This paper uses a new book by Harvard-based physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson, Epidemic I…
Open’ relationships
What are academic journals for? In a digital era, we access single articles; personal subscribers are few, and those who skim or read whole issues of scholarly periodicals are likely even fewer. So
Premature evaluation? Some cautionary thoughts on global pandemics and scholarly publishing
In the space of two short months, the coronavirus pandemic has transformed the social, economic, and political landscape across the globe. For many, our research plans and projects have been one of
Concepts, disciplines and politics
It has long been recognised that human health is indelibly shaped by a variety of factors. These include pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, but also broad-ranging social, economic and political forces operating at different spatial scales. In seeking to understand the nature and effects of these forces, two concepts have become particularly influential: the ‘social determinants of health’ and ‘structural violence’. In this paper, we critical…
Journal standards and their stories
Signs, things and packaging
In recent years, cigarette packets have become the site of considerable legislative attention, via initiatives to remove industry branding from tobacco products. These efforts are based on the premise that branded cigarette packaging acts as a 'silent salesman' for smoking. According to this perspective, the cigarette packet has a particular sort of agency, but one rooted in its communicative powers rather than its material qualities. In this art…
The 'problem' of undesigned relationality
Perhaps the most unique feature of ethnographic fieldwork is the distinctive form of relationality it entails, where the ethnographer's identity as a researcher is not fixed in the way typical of most other forms of research. In this paper, I explore how this 'undesigned relationality' is understood, both in procedural ethics frameworks and by the different disciplines that have come to claim a stake in the 'method' itself. Demonstrating that the…
Communitas and the commons
In this article, the author reflects on the open access movement as a social and political phenomenon via the lens of Turner's work on liminality and communitas. Moving beyond the neo-liberalization frame, which is the primary way that the transformations in open access have been conceptualized to date, she argues that they are better understood as a product of the hybridizing relationship between structure and anti-structure. This perspective al…
Whatever happened to the 'social' science in Social Science & Medicine? On golden anniversaries and gold standards
‘Predatory’ Open Access Journals as Parody
The concept of the ‘predatory’ publisher has today become a standard way of characterizing a new breed of open access journals that seem to be more concerned with making a profit than disseminating academic knowledge. This essay presents an alternative view of such publishers, arguing that if we treat them as parody instead of predator, a far more nuanced reading emerges. Viewed in this light, such journals destabilize the prevailing discourse on…
Cultivating ambivalence
Anthropologists' longstanding ambivalence toward political advocacy has, in recent years, come under sustained fire-a shift that is often framed in terms of the discipline's "moral turn." In this essay, we make a case for the value of ambivalence, asking what lessons it yields as a methodological heuristic. Tracing the history of the concept, we argue that anthropology was founded on an epistemological ambivalence regarding its orientation to soc…
On the perils of invoking neoliberalism in public health critique
Read any issue of Critical Public Health and you’re more likely than not to see the concept of ‘neoliberalism’ invoked at some point. Inputting it as a keyword in the journal brings up 93 papers, a
Challenging key assumptions embedded in Health Canada’s cigarette packaging legislation
More journal standards and their stories
Breast vs. the rest
Habits
Habits: Remaking Addiction is an intriguing and ambitious book and a timely intervention into prevailing ways of thinking about addiction. Strongly influenced by science and technology studies and
Every space is claimed
Over the past decade, the strategy of 'denormalising' tobacco use has become one of the cornerstones of the global tobacco control movement. Although tobacco denormalisation policies primarily affect people on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, few qualitative studies have explicitly set out to explore how smokers have experienced and responded to these legislative and social changes in attitudes towards tobacco use. Drawing on a qualitative …
The breast-cancer-ization of cancer survivorship
Resisting Commensurability
In this article, I examine anthropology's embrace of the informed consent doctrine at the end of the 1990s. Although acknowledging its utility in resolving the tensions between disciplinary ideals of openness in field research and the diverse array of contexts in which anthropologists now work, I argue that it has not been in our best interest to co-opt the concept. Bringing together the prior critiques of the informed consent doctrine's applicat…
Feminism and the Invisible Fat Man
In this article we argue that the complex connections between gender and fatness have not been fully examined, particularly in so far as they relate to men. We consider the role of early feminist literature in establishing the idea that the fear of fatness is fundamentally tied up with patriarchy and the ways this also underwrites more recent examinations of fatness and gender. Moreover, we assert that popular feminist scholarship has actively pr…
Cancer survivorship, mor(t)ality and lifestyle discourses on cancer prevention
Despite ongoing controversies regarding the impact of lifestyle factors such as body weight, diet and exercise on health, this framework has become increasingly prominent in understandings of cancer aetiology. To date, little consideration has been given to the impacts of such discourses on people with a history of cancer. Drawing on an ethnographic study of cancer survivors, I explore the constitutive dimensions of these discourses and the ways …
Cultivating ambivalence
Anthropologists' longstanding ambivalence toward political advocacy has, in recent years, come under sustained fire-a shift that is often framed in terms of the discipline's "moral turn." In this essay, we make a case for the value of ambivalence, asking what lessons it yields as a methodological heuristic. Tracing the history of the concept, we argue that anthropology was founded on an epistemological ambivalence regarding its orientation to soc…
Genital Cutting and Western Discourses on Sexuality
This article explores dominant discourses surrounding male and female genital cutting. Over a similar period of time, these genital operations have separately been subjected to scrutiny and criticism. However, although critiques of female circumcision have been widely taken up, general public opinion toward male circumcision remains indifferent. This difference cannot merely be explained by the natural attributes and effects of these practices. R…
The 'problem' of undesigned relationality
Perhaps the most unique feature of ethnographic fieldwork is the distinctive form of relationality it entails, where the ethnographer's identity as a researcher is not fixed in the way typical of most other forms of research. In this paper, I explore how this 'undesigned relationality' is understood, both in procedural ethics frameworks and by the different disciplines that have come to claim a stake in the 'method' itself. Demonstrating that the…
Towards a Critical Anthropology of Smoking
The World Health Organization warned today that countries will need to be much more aggressive in their attempts to stamp out smoking if they are to counter the tobacco industry's marketing techniques (WHO, 2008
Metastatic Cancer and Mothering
For the majority of people diagnosed with metastatic cancer, there is little hope of a disease-free future. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a support group for women with metastatic cancer, we examine the relationship between metastases and mothering. We argue that the experience of raising children while living with a terminal illness crystallizes cultural expectations about mothering based on an essentialist model of parenthood whereby the…
Research ethics committees, ethnographers and imaginations of risk
Ethnographers' concerns about institutional ethics review are by now well-known and several hypotheses have been advanced to explain their complaints. Many have highlighted the lack of epistemological fit between ethnographic methods and ethics review paradigms. Others point to the existence of a "victim narrative" and suggest that circulating horror stories are unrepresentative of ethnographers' experiences, or argue that ethnographers' complain…
Biomarkers, the molecular gaze and the transformation of cancer survivorship
Over the past two decades, molecular technologies have transformed the landscape of cancer diagnosis, treatment and disease surveillance. However, although the effects of these technologies in the areas of primary and secondary cancer prevention have been the focus of growing study, their role in tertiary prevention remains largely unexamined. Treating this topic as a problematic to be conceptually explored rather than empirically demonstrated, t…
If it almost kills you that means it's working!' Cultural models of chemotherapy expressed in a cancer support group
What Women Who Use Drugs Have to Say about Ethical Research
Drug users are generally seen as a vulnerable population requiring special protection in research; however, to date there has been little empirical research into the ethics of research with illicit drug users. Moreover, the available research has tended to treat "drug users" as a homogeneous category, and has failed to consider potential gender differences in users' experiences. Drawing on focus groups with twenty-seven female drug users in Vanco…
Ethical quandaries in social research
Alcohol in Latin America
As I write this review, the 2014 World Cup is currently underway in Brazil. FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association), the governing body responsible for organizing the World Cup, ha
Being 'thick' indicates you are eating, you are healthy and you have an attractive body shape
Despite recent critiques of contemporary obesity discourses that link 'modern Western lifestyles' to an 'obesity epidemic', the population's weight remains a central concern of current dietary guidelines. Food choices that are considered beneficial to maintaining a certain weight are understood to play a key role in one's health. This concern reflects medico-moral assumptions about the properties of food and what people should eat. However, the i…
Does the hand that controls the cigarette packet rule the smoker? Findings from ethnographic interviews with smokers in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA
All gates lead to smoking
"Communicating "Evidence
In the era of evidence-based health care, conferences aimed at disseminating scientific knowledge perform an essential role in shaping policy and research agendas and transforming physician practice. Drawing on observations at two U.S. cancer prevention conferences aimed at knowledge translation, we examine the ways that evidence regarding the relationship between cancer and lifestyle is articulated and enacted. We show that characterizations of …
Whither Tobacco Studies
In recent years, tobacco research has become an increasingly politicized field, with ‘legitimate’ research on this topic expected to further the goals of tobacco control. This paper presents an overview of the state of field of social science studies on tobacco and critiques the growing polarity evident in scholarship on this topic. Moving beyond mainstream public health perspectives, I outline a body of research that challenges dominant understa…
Scholarly Publishing, Boundary Processes, and the Problem of Fake Peer Reviews
Over the past decade, the phenomenon of "fake" peer reviews has caused growing consternation among scholarly publishers. Yet despite the significant behind-the-scenes impact that anxieties about fakery have had on peer review processes within scholarly journals, the phenomenon itself has been subject to little scholarly analysis. Rather than treating fake reviews as a straightforward descriptive category, in this article, we explore how the disco…
Where There's Smoke There's Fire
The Canadian city of Vancouver was very early to introduce extensive smokefree legislation. Smoking has been banned in all indoor locations for well over a decade and tobacco control advocates have also recently begun to push for the expansion of such legislation into outdoor spaces in the city. Drawing on a 6-month period of observation of smokers and “not-smokers” on their lunch breaks at office sites in downtown Vancouver, I examine the ways t…
Location Restrictions on Smoking
Signs, things and packaging
In recent years, cigarette packets have become the site of considerable legislative attention, via initiatives to remove industry branding from tobacco products. These efforts are based on the premise that branded cigarette packaging acts as a 'silent salesman' for smoking. According to this perspective, the cigarette packet has a particular sort of agency, but one rooted in its communicative powers rather than its material qualities. In this art…
British Policy Towards the Construction of the Suez Canal
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Ecological economic modeling and valuation of ecosystems
The Gendering of Religious Experience
Cheondogyo is a Korean religion which espouses a central doctrine that has often been labelled ‘radically egalitarian.’ However, although religious ideologies emphasize gender equality, in practice these themes are translated in ways that seem to limit women's access to power. These gender differences are most apparent in ecstatic trance, which occurs reasonably often during religious training sessions. While legitimized by the religion's founder…
The trouble with charisma
Genital Cutting and Western Discourses on Sexuality
This article explores dominant discourses surrounding male and female genital cutting. Over a similar period of time, these genital operations have separately been subjected to scrutiny and criticism. However, although critiques of female circumcision have been widely taken up, general public opinion toward male circumcision remains indifferent. This difference cannot merely be explained by the natural attributes and effects of these practices. R…
Prediction of height from knee height in children with cerebral palsy and non-disabled children
Measurement of height or length is essential in the assessment of nutritional status. In some conditions, for example cerebral palsy (CP), such measurements may be difficult or impossible. Proxy measurements such as knee height have been used to predict height in such cases. We have evaluated two equations in the literature that predict stature from knee height in a group of 17 children with CP and 20 non-disabled children. The two equations perf…
Feminism and the Invisible Fat Man
In this article we argue that the complex connections between gender and fatness have not been fully examined, particularly in so far as they relate to men. We consider the role of early feminist literature in establishing the idea that the fear of fatness is fundamentally tied up with patriarchy and the ways this also underwrites more recent examinations of fatness and gender. Moreover, we assert that popular feminist scholarship has actively pr…
Pilgrims and Progress
Since its inception, Chondogyo has self-consciously maintained an identity as a "new" and "modern" Korean religion. These claims have seen ongoing efforts to rationalize religious practice and theology and purge the movement of "anti-modern," "superstitious" elements. This article explores the differing receptions of pilgrimage and ecstatic trance within the organization: the two major forms of embodied religious experience in Chondogyo. While th…
Medicine, morality and mothering
Over the past few decades, three issues have emerged as threats to the health of infants and children in western, industrialised countries: the developmental impact of alcohol use in pregnancy (Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, or FASD), children's exposure to second-hand smoke in the home, and childhood overnutrition and obesity. The definitive role of drinking during pregnancy, exposure to second-hand smoke and overnutrition on negative health …
Pain, physical dependence and pseudoaddiction
Location Restrictions on Smoking
If it almost kills you that means it's working!' Cultural models of chemotherapy expressed in a cancer support group
Smoking, stigma and tobacco ‘denormalization’
A prospective, longitudinal study of growth, nutrition and sedentary behaviour in young children with cerebral palsy
This protocol describes a study that will provide the first longitudinal description of the relationship between functional attainment and modifiable lifestyle factors (dietary intake and habitual time spent sedentary) and their impact on the growth, body composition and nutritional status of young children with cerebral palsy across all levels of functional ability
Being 'thick' indicates you are eating, you are healthy and you have an attractive body shape
Despite recent critiques of contemporary obesity discourses that link 'modern Western lifestyles' to an 'obesity epidemic', the population's weight remains a central concern of current dietary guidelines. Food choices that are considered beneficial to maintaining a certain weight are understood to play a key role in one's health. This concern reflects medico-moral assumptions about the properties of food and what people should eat. However, the i…
Every space is claimed
Over the past decade, the strategy of 'denormalising' tobacco use has become one of the cornerstones of the global tobacco control movement. Although tobacco denormalisation policies primarily affect people on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, few qualitative studies have explicitly set out to explore how smokers have experienced and responded to these legislative and social changes in attitudes towards tobacco use. Drawing on a qualitative …
Cancer survivorship, mor(t)ality and lifestyle discourses on cancer prevention
Despite ongoing controversies regarding the impact of lifestyle factors such as body weight, diet and exercise on health, this framework has become increasingly prominent in understandings of cancer aetiology. To date, little consideration has been given to the impacts of such discourses on people with a history of cancer. Drawing on an ethnographic study of cancer survivors, I explore the constitutive dimensions of these discourses and the ways …
PSA testing
Although the value of the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test as a cancer-screening instrument remains hotly contested, over the past two decades its usage has become commonplace. While most men diagnosed with prostate cancer will die with rather than of the disease, widespread PSA screening has led to an attendant increase in cancer diagnoses and the usage of aggressive treatments to ‘combat’ it. Despite the central (if controversial) role that…
The Impact of Cancer on Family Relationships Among Chinese Patients
This study examines the impact of cancer on family relationships among members of a Chinese cancer support group. A qualitative research design was used, including participant observation of 96 participants at group meetings over an 8-month period and in-depth interviews with seven group members. Findings indicated that family members were integral to the support group, constituting almost 40% of the participants. Patients in the group expressed …
Alcohol, tobacco, obesity and the new public health
[Extract] Although drinking, smoking and obesity have long been a focus of social and moral opprobrium, during the last two decades of the twentieth century, they came under concerted attack from the field of knowledge and action that has come to be known as the new public health. Over the next two issues, Critical Public Health will feature a series of papers that critically examine public health policy and practice across these three areas. Emp…
Physician advice for smoking cessation in primary care
General practitioners are often exhorted to routinely counsel patients who smoke about quitting in light of current evidence-based medicine (EBM) guidelines suggesting that such brief interventions provide an easy and effective way of increasing quit rates. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 smokers and 10 general practitioners (GPs) in British Columbia, Canada, this article explores smokers' and GPs' perspectives on smoking …
Legislating abjection? Secondhand smoke, tobacco control policy and the public's health
Since the mid-1990s, the position that 'no amount of secondhand smoke is safe' has achieved hegemonic status in the field of public health. This has bolstered efforts in the tobacco control community to advocate for smoke-free legislation and a variety of countries around the world have implemented indoor smoking bans, with many others presently following suit. This article examines why secondhand smoke has been such a central focus in tobacco co…
What Women Who Use Drugs Have to Say about Ethical Research
Drug users are generally seen as a vulnerable population requiring special protection in research; however, to date there has been little empirical research into the ethics of research with illicit drug users. Moreover, the available research has tended to treat "drug users" as a homogeneous category, and has failed to consider potential gender differences in users' experiences. Drawing on focus groups with twenty-seven female drug users in Vanco…
Metastatic Cancer and Mothering
For the majority of people diagnosed with metastatic cancer, there is little hope of a disease-free future. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a support group for women with metastatic cancer, we examine the relationship between metastases and mothering. We argue that the experience of raising children while living with a terminal illness crystallizes cultural expectations about mothering based on an essentialist model of parenthood whereby the…
Cochrane reviews and the behavioural turn in evidence-based medicine
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has been one of the most important movements in clinical medicine and public health in recent years. At the heart of the EBM movement lies the Cochrane Collaboration, an influential organisation that produces systematic assessments of healthcare interventions known as Cochrane reviews. Although Cochrane methods were initially designed to test the efficacy of medical therapies, the desire for ‘evidence-based’ practice…
Political science (43 obras) · Sociology (39 obras) · Medicine (37 obras) · Law (29 obras) · Psychology (28 obras) · Law (25 obras) · Public health (18 obras) · Social science (17 obras) · Epistemology (16 obras) · Social Psychology (16 obras)