Related Guides
About Sociology of Health Care
This guide provides selected course-specific resources for SO215: Sociology of Health Care.
Featured Resource: Chronicle of Higher Education
- How Sociologists Can Battle Covid Denialism (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 Sep 2021) The behaviors that usually get thrown into the black box of “irrationality” are sociology’s specialty. And that’s why it’s an especially useful discipline for dealing with the national public-health emergency we face. Insights from sociological theorists like Robert Merton and Erving Goffman can do more than explain the strange pandemic behavior we’ve seen in recent months: They can save lives.
Featured Article
- Böhrer, A., Döbler, M.-K., & Tarkkala, H. (2023). Facemasks, material and metaphors: An analysis of socio-material dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Sociological Review, (SAGE) In 2020, not only did the Sars-Cov-2 virus become a global pandemic, but public life also changed in the wake of various infection control measures. Increased use of masks was one of the first clearly visible changes. With the masks came stories about masks. Who wore them, where people should wear them, and why? It quickly became clear, however, that stories about ‘the facemask’ also have a metaphorical content, negotiating not only problems of the pandemic as a social crisis, but also other social issues amalgamated through the use of masks and the surrounding narratives. Thus, masks not only prevented infection, but also fed and materialised the public imaginary of the pandemic and its challenges. From this perspective, we explore three exemplary cases from Germany and Finland in 2020 in which the mask played different roles as a socio-material phenomenon, linking theoretical perspectives on materiality and metaphors. Additionally, the analysis presents illustrations done by a visual artist. These illustrations capture the key content of the analysis in the form of drawings.
