Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter maps out recent developments in conceptualising abortion stigma. The chapter begins with the dominance of psychological and quantitative understandings of abortion stigma, and the tendency in this work to frame abortion stigma as a static attribute that one can possess or impose onto others. The remainder of the chapter offers alternative approaches to conceptualising abortion stigma that understand stigma as an operation of power. To do so, it proposes a typology of four ‘power-attendant’ approaches to understanding abortion stigma: discursive; intersectional; biopolitical; and embodied. The chapter explains how these overlapping approaches understand stigma as a regulatory function of power, often State-sanctioned, rather than an unfortunate social ill that might be solved by ‘raising awareness’. Understanding how abortion stigma is produced and maintained – that is, stigma as a productive and political concept (Tyler and Slater, 2018) – has material consequences globally for individuals, communities, and societies.
This chapter extends thinking about how stigmas emerge and change over time, arguing that a dynamic network theory best reflects the complex, local, and global processes of stigma change. At the core of ‘stigma mutation’ are three dimensions of stigma (Farrimond, 2021): lineage (how stigma emerges in relation to histories and other stigma); variation (how stigma changes in relation to culture or location); and strength (how stigma intensifies and/or weakens over time). The chapter argues that these dimensions are interrelated dynamically, allowing for multiple connections which are predictable (territorialised) and unpredictable (de-territorialised). This theory enables an understanding of why stigmas cluster around already marginalised groups, but also of how unexpected connections or events can disrupt stigma. This theory is illustrated using the example of long COVID stigma, which has emerged out of COVID-19 stigma, but has its specific lineage, variations, and strengths at this cultural moment.
Within social studies of health and illness, the concept of ‘stigma’ is often under-defined, used as vague catch-all term, and treated simply as an ever-present feature of particular illnesses/conditions. In this chapter, the authors argue that there is, therefore, a need to recalibrate stigma. The chapter begins by returning to Erving Goffman’s (1963) work on stigma, and particularly his contention that stigma is rooted in interactions and relationships. The chapter then turns to recent scholarship on rethinking the sociology of stigma (such as Scambler [2018] and Tyler [2020]), which attempts to recognise and study the political economy of stigma. From here, the authors outline their priorities for recalibrating stigma, namely, as operating at both the symbolic (micro) and structural (macro) levels in society. In so doing, they intend to rescue what is often lost or unaccounted for in current analyses of stigma, health, and illness.
Unruly bodies challenge social order. Uncontained movement, bodily fluids, and/or perceived impairments are highly regulated by societal disgust and through feelings of shame, humiliation, and historical prejudices. Claims of disability and ill-health run the risk of being dismissed as disingenuous or a cause of diminished performance, productivity, and/or absence from work. This chapter will explore how and why deviant or uncontained bodies are concealed or disclosed in the workplace, and their subsequent workplace implications. This includes reflection on the transactional nature of work and how it replicates and supports Parsons’ theorising of the sick role: an exchange of the obligations of being ill, for temporary respite from ordinary duties. It goes on to explore how employees are stigmatised when their experiences of long-term conditions and disability (including pain, leakiness, fatigue, and fluctuation) challenge this theorising, and how this challenge manifests in workplace relations and negotiations of legitimacy, deservingness, and performance.
This chapter examines how the pursuit of health through exercise in particular has become a ‘moral economy’, conflating physical and moral fitness. As such, exercise is not simply about being healthy, but fulfilling societal expectations. Drawing from Norbert Elias’ figurational sociology, the chapter analyses stigma as an embodied process within this moral economy, shaped by power relationships and experienced through emotional responses like shame and embarrassment, where the experience of feeling less worthy than others is interpreted as individual inferiority or (moral) failing. Such attitudes are sustained by a ‘body fascism’ that frames the body as a machine, meant to maximise output and minimise health risks. Body fascism, stigma, and the moral economy of exercise reveal our deep emotional attachment to our assumptions of health, identity, and societal responsibility where exercising is a marker of good citizenship, reinforcing social and emotional pressure to move more.
In this chapter, the author develops thinking from their monograph, Injecting Bodies in More-than-Human Worlds. They take up an understanding of stigma as relational and explore the ways that people who use drugs are prevented from living full lives: not through their drug use but through these toxic connections. Exploring three such events of ‘blocked becoming’, the chapter conceptualises stigma as a life-limiting socio-material process. Where a narrow understanding of stigma as socially produced has led scholars and activists to look to science and ‘matter’ as a way out, this research highlights the limits of such an approach. Posing the medical category of addiction as a problem rather than a solution to stigma, the author considers how people who use drugs think of and inhabit their drug use as an alternative way of being, refusing pathology. It is by better attuning to and responding to these modes that destigmatisation can take place.
This chapter argues that recalibrating stigma should involve recalibrating anti-stigma. By revisiting the ethics of stigma in public health, the authors illustrate how the moral certainty evident in the pro-/anti-stigma lobbies obstructs an acknowledgement and understanding of the complexity, inconsistency, and diversity of stigma and its affects. Using the example of anti-stigma efforts in the field of mental health, they propose a novel concept – ‘destigmatisation drift’ – to explain how approaches to anti-stigma can weaken efforts to address social drivers of suffering, illness, and even stigma itself. They continue their exploration of the tensions in anti-stigma theory and practice through the examples of ‘obesity’, anorexia, and self-harm. Each case captures how complicated the moral and practical considerations of addressing stigma are, and why an oversimplistic pro-/anti-stigma framing is an inadequate route to understanding or addressing these issues and many others.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Stigma has long been a central concern for social scientists studying health and illness. Yet, in existing work, stigma often escapes definition and clarification, is treated as universal and constant, and becomes a vague catch-all term for a range of conditions and situations.
This book initiates a process of recalibrating the conceptualisation of stigma. The book features original analyses from early- and mid-career scholars focusing on diverse issues, including mental health, racism, sex, HIV, reproduction, obesity, eating disorders, self-harm, exercise, drug use, COVID-19 and disability.
This ambitious book offers new perspectives to stimulate and intensify conversations around stigma, and highlights the valuable contributions of sociological approaches to the study of health and illness.
This concluding chapter highlights overlapping themes across the chapters. First, the authors discuss the need to comprehend the origins and developments of stigma by calling attention to its political economy, but contend that analyses should not be limited to either ‘macro’- or ‘micro’-level factors. Instead, they argue that it is crucial to understand both how and why stigma is generated, and what it generates and why. In doing so, they emphasise that, when evaluating the contemporary uses and harms of stigma, it is important to understand how stigma shifts, pivots, and mutates over time, and within and across geographical contexts. Second, they urge researchers to avoid assuming that stigma is interpreted or experienced in universal ways. Third, they acknowledge the under-theorised connection between shame and stigma. This concluding chapter challenges researchers working on stigma to consider not only where dominant (stigmatising) discourses come from and how they are sustained, but also how they are mobilised, challenged, resisted, and/or refused by individuals and/or groups.
Male infertility is routinely considered a source of stigma for men (Hanna and Gough, 2015), with men suggested to be subject to greater stigma in relation to fertility issues than women (Gannon et al, 2004). Stigmatisation from infertility is correlated to hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995), specifically around the value placed on men being both virile and fertile, including the conflation of infertility with impotence (Inhorn, 2004). Yet, the evidence for stigma in relation to male infertility is often empirically lacking (Gannon et al, 2004; Hanna and Gough, 2015). This chapter examines how hegemonic masculinity and stigma are routinely seen as intertwined in the context of male infertility, but rarely unpacked. In doing so, it examines how, despite perceived changes in masculinities in contemporary society, stigma is still routinely seen as fixed and in need of challenge, despite limited empirical evidence for how this could be operationalised.
