Society for the Study of Social Problems Health, Health Policy, and Health Services Division Newsletter Newsletter Editor: Virginia Kuulei Berndt In This Issue Spring/Summer 2024 Messages from the Co-Chairs 1-2 Division Sessions at the 2024 Annual Meeting 3-4 Division Awards 5-7 Members on the Job Market 7-10 Division Updates 11-12 Message from the Co-Chairs As we approach the 2024 SSSP Annual Meeting in Montréal, we are filled with excitement about our Division’s sponsored sessions! The topics span mental health, medical violence, animals, reproductive justice, health in legal context, climate change, and more! We are also thrilled to introduce you to our Graduate Student Paper Award winner and Outstanding Scholarship Award Co-Winners. We are so grateful to the committee members for their service! Looking forward to seeing you all in Montréal, Yuying Shen & Virginia Kuulei Berndt CALL FOR NOMINATIONS SSSP’s Health Division seeks nominations for: Division Co-Chair Graduate Student Paper Award Committee Outstanding Scholarship Award Committee Newsletter Editor If interested, please e-mail Division Co-Chair, Virginia Berndt, at virginia.berndt@mcdaniel.edu. PAGE 2 Outgoing Co-Chair Yuying Shen, PhD Associate Professor of Sociology Norfolk State University “Dear SSSP Health Division Members, I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to offer my service to our amazing Health Division. Thank you all for being a member of the Health Division and for making your commitment to the growth of our division. I would also like to extend my appreciation for the help and support from Michele, Ginger (Dr. Virginia Berndt) during my tenure as Co-Chair, and many members who lend their efforts and talents to our annual meeting programs and other division events. Many thanks and looking forward to meeting you and learning your exciting research in Montreal in August.” Incoming Co-Chair Raja Staggers-Hakim, PhD Assistant Professor of Sociology University of Connecticut “I am thrilled to join the Health Division as co-chair. Over the next two years, I hope to engage in dialogue with members around various topics related to health justice and the pursuit of health equity. Together, I look forward to celebrating our contributions to the field of sociology, medical sociology, public health and health policy and for considering opportunities for our scholarship and applied work to reach our students and those communities who will most benefit most from our research.” Special Thanks to our co-sponsoring divisions for the 2024 annual meeting Community Research & Development Critical Race & Ethnic Study Drinking & Drugs Gender Institutional Ethnography Global Law & Society Poverty, Class, & Inequality Sexual Behavior, Politics, & Communities Society & Mental Health Sport, Leisure, & the Body Social Problems Theory Sociology & Social Welfare PAGE 3 Sessions for the 2024 Annual Meeting Session 009: Bodies For Sale: Use of Humans & Animals for Entertainment Organizer: Michael O. Johnston Date and Time: Friday, August 9 - 12:30-2:10pm Location: Drummond West Session 023: Alternatives to Policing Organizers: Keisha M. Muia and Paul J. Draus Date and Time: Friday, August 9 - 2:30-4:10pm Location: Hemon Session 035: Global Health, Climate, Inequality and Environment I Organizer: Claire E.B. Cannon Date and Time: Friday, August 9 - 4:30-6:10pm Location: Kafka Session 053: Global Health, Climate, Inequality and Environment II Organizer: Claire E.B. Cannon Date and Time: Saturday, August 10 - 10:30am-12:10pm Location: Hemon Session 062: Papers in the Round: Bodily Autonomy and Health Organizer: Virginia Kuulei Berndt Date and Time: Saturday, August 10 - 12:30-2:10pm Location: Ballroom West The 2024 Annual Meeting will be held at the Le Centre Sheraton in Montréal. PAGE 4 Sessions for the 2024 Annual Meeting Session 070: Structural Determinants of Health and Legal Needs Organizer: William D. Cabin Date and Time: Saturday, August 10 - 2:30-4:10pm Location: Drummond Centre Session 089: The Changing Impact of Technologies on Mental Health Organizers: Yuying Shen and Douglas J. Engelman Date and Time: Sunday, August 11 - 10:30am-12:10pm Location: Salon 5 Session 101: Reproductive Justice Organizer: Giovanna Follo Date and Time: Sunday, August 11 - 12:30-2:10pm Location: Hemon Session 111: The Social Organization of Medical Violence Organizer: Kathryn Nowotny Date and Time: Sunday, August 11 - 2:30-4:10pm Location: Hemon JOIN US FOR THE HEALTH DIVISION IN-PERSON BUSINESS MEETING Date and Time: Friday, August 9 - 4:30-6:10pm Location: Ballroom West The 2024 Annual Meeting will be held at the Le Centre Sheraton in Montréal PAGE 5 Outstanding Scholarship Award Co-Winner Josh Seim, PhD Boston College Dr. Josh Seim is a Co-Winner of SSSP’s Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services’ 2024 Outstanding Scholarship Award. Dr. Seim’s research on ambulance labor is rooted in a two-year intensive ethnography as both a ride-along and a novice emergency medical technician (EMT) as well as an examination of over 100,000 ambulance medical records from a private for-profit ambulance firm in California. Dr. Seim’s research has been published in American Sociological Review (2017), Social Science and Medicine (2022), Sociology of Health and illness (2022), Prehospital Emergency Care (2017, 2018), and Sociological Methods and Research (2021). The core of his research is captured in his book, Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering (2020, University of California Press). This book seeks to understand the role that ambulance workers play in governing the downward distribution of suffering in the capitalist and racist city. Dr. Seim explained in his nomination letter that this isn’t a book about absent or tardy ambulances, nor is it a book about medical exclusion. Rather, it’s a book that details how paramedics and EMTs confront a mixed and endless stream of suffering bodies in the city’s most destitute and stigmatized territories. Dr. Seim argues that ambulance crews help govern urban suffering by bandaging, sorting, and hustling bodies. Ambulance crews bandage bodies by offering superficial solutions to the suffering produced and exacerbated by capitalism, white supremacy, and other injurious systems. This can be seen not only when crews apply gauze and pressure to a bloody gunshot wound but also when they connect drugless patients to prescription-writing physicians or when they scoop a body from the cold sidewalk and move it into a relatively warm hospital bed. Ambulance crews sort bodies by working with police on the streets and nurses in the hospital. From determining whether someone goes to jail or the hospital to the specific emergency department a patient is transported to and at what triage level, these frontline workers shape how suffering populations are sorted across a number of spaces. Finally, ambulance crews hustle bodies by rushing them through rapid periods of intervention. Dr. Seim illustrates how economic and political forces pressure paramedics and EMTs to complete as many billable transports as possible, and he shows how this amplifies worker exhaustion and exacerbates conflicts between ambulance crews, patients, nurses, and cops. While Dr. Seim’s ambulance study advances multiple subfields in sociology, including urban and labor, it is fundamentally an exercise in medical sociology. On the one hand, it sheds light on the medical governance of urban suffering. On the other hand, it illuminates the medical labor process. Dr. Seim is very hopeful that these contributions will motivate future scholarship in medical sociology and beyond. Congratulations! PAGE 6 Outstanding Scholarship Award Co-Winner Meredith Van Natta, PhD University of California, Merced Dr. Meredith Van Natta is a Co-Winner of SSSP’s Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services’ 2024 Outstanding Scholarship Award. Dr. Van Natta’s scholarship on “medical legal violence” includes her recently published book, Medical Legal Violence: Health Care and Immigration Enforcement Against Latinx Noncitizens (NYU Press 2023), as well as her related articles on this topic in Social Science & Medicine and Law & Society Review. “Medical legal violence” refers to the incursion of antiimmigrant laws into healthcare institutions in ways that disproportionately surveil and penalize immigrants of color as they seek health care, and it also enrolls healthcare workers as either agents or targets of that violence. Through clinic ethnography and in-depth interviews in three states from 2015 to 2020, Dr. Van Natta examined how anti-immigrant laws grounded in racial capitalism have altered how Latinx immigrants and clinic workers weigh illness and injury against patients’ personal and family security. Dr. Van Natta also revealed how clinic workers have actively resisted the perceived incursion of immigration enforcement surveillance into healthcare spaces through various strategies that engage their unique positionality. While Dr. Van Natta has focused primarily on the empirical case of citizen-based healthcare stratifications, the concept of medical legal violence also carries important implications for other contexts of contested, politicized health care. For example, as suggested in her Law & Society Review article, policies that deny vital gender-affirming and reproductive health care in the United States similarly compromise the health and safety of targeted communities while enlisting healthcare institutions and personnel in sometimes unexpected surveillance and enforcement efforts. Congratulations! PAGE 7 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award Elizabeth M. Anderson, PhD Candidate Indiana University, Bloomington Website: [link] | E-Mail: anderelm@iu.edu Member On the Job Market! Elizabeth M. Anderson is the winner of SSSP’s Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services’ 2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award for her paper, titled, “Beyond Motherhood: Exploring the Unmet Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare Needs in the Medicaid Landscape.” Congratulations, Elizabeth! Elizabeth is also on the job market! See her profile below: Elizabeth M. Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University, where she also received her M.A. in Sociology and her M.S. in Applied Statistics. Her research focuses on the intersection of medical sociology, gender, and inequality, with a specific interest in how structural and institutional forces influence healthcare utilization. Her dissertation draws upon in-depth interviews and administrative electronic medical records to examine how social policies, including Medicaid policy and local-level reproductive healthcare access policies, shape disparities in sexual and reproductive healthcare utilization. The manuscript based on the first chapter of her dissertation was awarded the 2024 SSSP Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services Graduate Student Paper Award. Elizabeth’s research has been published in Social Science & Medicine – Population Health, Science Advances, and PLOS One. Her research is supported by a National Research Service Award Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) from the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and an Emerging Scholar Award from the Society of Family Planning. Congratulations! PAGE 8 On the Job Market Caroline Brooks, PhD Candidate Indiana University Website: [link] | E-mail: cvbrooks@iu.edu Caroline Brooks is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her interests span medical sociology, social psychology, social networks, and inequality. Much of her research explores how the experience and perception of health and illness are shaped by social statuses such as race, ethnicity, gender, etc., as well as the structure and content of one’s social relationships. Her dissertation uses mixed methods to examine the role of social networks and patient community integration in the process by which migraine – a common albeit misunderstood chronic, invisible illness – impacts role identities and psychological wellbeing. She is the recipient of the 2024 Howard B. Kaplan Award in Medical Sociology by the ASA Section on Medical Sociology. Recent publications include: Brooks, Caroline V. Forthcoming. “Resilience or Risk? Evaluating Three Pathways Linking Hispanic Immigrant Networks and Health” Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Cohen, Fred, Caroline V. Brooks, Daniel Sun, Dawn C. Buse, Michael L. Reed, Kristina Fanning, Richard L. Lipton. 2024. “Prevalence and Burden of Migraine in the United States: A Systematic Review” Headache 64:516-532. DOI: 10.1111/head.14709 [Link] PAGE 9 On the Job Market Gabby Gomez, PhD Candidate Oklahoma State University Website: [link] | E-mail: gabby.gomez@okstate.edu Gabby Gomez is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Oklahoma State University specializing in inequality, healthcare/medicine, and social movements, with a particular focus on weight-based inequality and the weight-inclusive healthcare movement. Before studying at Oklahoma State, Gabby earned an M.A. in Sociology and a graduate certificate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from Lehigh University. Her dissertation is an interview study examining weight-inclusive healthcare practitioners’ lived experiences. Specifically, she examines how healthcare practitioners become involved in the weight-inclusive healthcare movement, what their work looks like and how they advance social change/justice through their work, and how they have been personally and professionally impacted by their involvement in the movement. Her sole-authored research has been awarded by the Faculty Council for Gender Equity at Oklahoma State University and Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honor Society. Gabby is passionate about both research and teaching and is interested in joining a department that enables her to pursue both activities. In addition to teaching three sections of Introduction to Sociology at Oklahoma State University, she has participated in several teaching workshops through Lehigh University, Oklahoma State University, and the American Sociological Association. She is prepared to teach courses relating to inequality, social problems, gender and sexuality, health and healthcare, social movements, and social psychology. Gabby has also worked on many collaborative research projects, including Healing Pathways, Together Overcoming Diabetes, and The American Local Leaders Study, funded by the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation. PAGE 10 On the Job Market Steve Durant, PhD University of Toronto Website: [link]| E-mail: steve.durant@utoronto.ca Steve Durant is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where he completed a doctorate in Health Services Research. His dissertation, “Visions and Shadows: a Socio-History of the Mental-Health Policy Reform Agenda in Canada”, presented a critical investigation into discourse on mental-health policy, with a focus on the shift towards neoliberal priorities. This work blended critical discourse analysis with concepts from Institutional Ethnography. It sought to explore what is left ‘in the shadows’ of governmental discourse that is increasingly framed in universal, economistic terms. While Dr. Durant’s dissertation work focused on texts, it also built on his interests and experience in frontline work pertaining to mental health, the social determinants of health, and the health-related impacts of the gig economy. In roles as a research assistant, postdoctoral fellow, and research coordinator, he has built on his passion for observational and interview-based research aligned with critical perspectives. Steve is currently on the job market. He is eager to contribute to further research focused on mental health, marginalization, and precarious work. PAGE 11 Member Updates Publications Virginia Kuulei Berndt Berndt, Virginia Kuulei and Ann V. Bell. 2023. “Beyond knowledge: Introducing Embodied Aversion through the case of contraception.” Social Science & Medicine 341: 116516. [Link] Chandra L. Ford Ford, Chandra and Whitney N.L. Pirtle. 2024 “Invited Commentary: Race, Ethnicity, and Racism in Epidemiologic Research - Perspectives from Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP).” American Journal of Epidemiology kwae064. [Link] Asia Friedman Friedman, Asia. 2023. Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes. Rutgers University Press. [Link] Erica Jablonski Kim, Hyun Ju, Erica Jablonski, Debra L. Brucker, Ada Chen, John O’Neill, and Andrew J. Houtenville. Forthcoming. “What Structural and Cultural Organizational Characteristics Affect Flexible Work Environments? Evidence from the 2017 and 2022 Kessler Foundation National Employment & Disability Survey: Supervisor Perspectives.” Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation. Tiffany Joseph Chugh, Mayank and Tiffany D. Joseph. 2024. “Citizenship Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Academic Mobility Knapsack.” Nature. [Link] Jason A. Smith Kristen M. Budd, Heather Dillaway, David C. Lane, Glenn W. Muschert, Manjusha Nair, and Jason A. Smith (eds.). 2024. Agenda for Social Justice: Solutions for 2024. Policy Press. [Link] PAGE 12 Member Updates Awards Caroline Brooks Caroline Brooks won the 2024 Howard B. Kaplan Award in Medical Sociology by the ASA Section on Medical Sociology. Asia Friedman Asia Friedman (University of Delaware) won the 2024 SSSP Social Problems Theory Division Book Award for her book, Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes (Rutgers University Press). Grants Josephine T.V. Greenbrook Josephine T.V. Greenbrook (University of Edinburgh and University of Gothenburg) received a 6.4 million SEK grant from the Swedish Research Council to conduct a 10-year qualitative longitudinal study called “The Boundaries Longitudinal Study” on physicians’ experiences of a new legislative proposition that is set to implement mandatory reporting of undocumented patients to police and migration authorities when they seek healthcare. Read more on the Swedish Research Council’s Website. [Link] Job Announcements Virginia Kuulei Berndt Virginia Kuulei Berndt is starting a new position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, USA. sal ryman sal ryman has accepted a tenure-track associate professor position in the MSW program at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan, USA. Their dissertation, to be defended in mid-June, is titled “Health Care Experiences of Trans Students Attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”