From Health Behaviours to Health Practices

Simon Cohn is a Reader in Medical Anthropology at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on issues related to diagnosis, contested conditions and chronic illness in the UK and other high-income societies. With a strong commitment to contemporary social theory, Cohn is interested in ways in which innovative social science can shape aspects of medical practice.

• Notes on contributors vii1 From health behaviours to health practices: an introduction 1Simon Cohn2 Actors, patients and agency: a recent history 7David Armstrong3 A socially situated approach to inform ways to improve health and wellbeing 19Christine Horrocks and Sally Johnson4 A relational approach to health practices: towards transcending the agency-structure divide 31Gerry Veenstra and Patrick John Burnett5 Environmental justice and health practices: understanding how health inequities arise at the local level 43Katherine L. Frohlich and Thomas Abel6 Why behavioural health promotion endures despite its failure to reduce health inequities 57Fran Baum and Matthew Fisher7 Behaviour change and social blinkers? The role of sociology in trials of self-management behavior in chronic conditions 69Bie Nio Ong, Anne Rogers, Anne Kennedy, Peter Bower, Tom Sanders, Andrew Morden, Sudeh Cheraghi-Sohi, Jane C. Richardson and Fiona Stevenson8 Thinking about changing mobility practices: how a social practice approach can help 82Sarah Nettleton and Judith Green9 Providers’ constructions of pregnant and early parenting women who use substances 95Cecilia Benoit, Camille Stengel, Lenora Marcellus, Helga Hallgrimsdottir, John Anderson, Karen MacKinnon,Rachel Phillips, Pilar Zazueta and Sinead Charbonneau10 Staying ‘in the zone’ but not passing the ‘point of no return’: embodiment, gender and drinking in mid-life 106Antonia C. Lyons, Carol Emslie and Kate Hunt11 Complexities and contingencies conceptualised: towards a model of reproductive navigation 120Erica van der Sijpt12 Sustained multiplicity in everyday cholesterol reduction: repertoires and practices in talk about ‘healthy living’ 132Catherine M. Will and Kate Weiner13 Enjoy your food: on losing weight and taking pleasure 145Else Vogel and Annemarie MolIndex 158