Contesting Illness: Processes and Practices

Discussion of power in relation to illness is scarce, even though it bears directly on health policy and service delivery. This edited collection tries to address that gap by looking at how the meanings and consequences of illness both shape, and are shaped by, particular practices.

Contributors from several disciplines bring a range of critical theories and research methods to bear on how power and illness intersect. Their chapters cover lived experiences of illness, diagnosis and treatment, as well as the wider discourses and policies that determine how people fall ill and how they deal with health care systems. Although each essay takes its own approach, all share a focus on contestation as a way of thinking about power and illness.

Rather than concentrating on one case, the authors examine illnesses whose legitimacy is disputed, such as chronic fatigue syndrome and environmental illness, alongside accepted diagnoses like cancer and autism, and look at the contested aspects even of those. The contributors are Jan Angus, Pia H. Bülow, Peter Conrad, Joyce Davidson, Helen Gremillion, Maren Klawiter, Joshua Kelley, Steve Kroll-Smith, Katherine Lippel, Pamela Moss, Michael Orsini, Michael J. Prince, Annie Potts, Mary Ellen Purkis, Sharon Dale Stone, Cheryl Stults, Katherine Teghtsoonian, Jane M. Ussher and Catherine van Mossel.