Our blog has been running since 2015 and had many people pitching in to keep it a blog for the Society by the Society. Our latest blog co-editors have just been announced at the latest ISCHP conference. As it happens, all three are kiwis studying health psychology at Massey University. You can read more about them in this post.
Abel’s post discusses the implications of Plan S, which requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state funding in member countries to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all (thanks, Wikipedia).
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Anthony Idowu Ajayi, African Population and Health Research Center; Boniface Ushie, African Population and Health Research Center, and Caroline Kabiru, African Population and Health Research Center
There has been tremendous growth in the number of studies on sexual and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa in the past two decades. Notably, there has been an increase in research documenting what works in improving adolescents’ health and wellbeing.
However, the use of findings from these studies to inform the development of policies is low. For example, research shows that educating young people about their sexuality and giving them access to contraceptive methods has lifelong benefits. But few sub-Saharan African countries have enacted laws or policies that follow through on the evidence.
As a result of this inaction, adolescents continue to experience early unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and other poor health outcomes.
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An important notion underlying most clinical and ethical pandemic guidance worldwide is the concept of fairness; whether this is the question of how to make decisions to allocate limited health resources or the need for ethical guidance on how healthcare staff should make difficult decisions about care to ensure that regulations are standardised around the country.
But when it comes to health, “fair” is a misnomer. This is because the principle of fairness relies on the premise that good health is available to everyone equally, when we know it is not.
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Few people relish the prospect of using sexual and reprodutive health services. Such encounters can be a bit awkward at best and – at worst – uncomfortable enough to discourage anyone from doing what’s needed to maintain their health and wellbeing. Buying condoms, asking a doctor about contraceptive options, having infections checked out, discussing bleeding or not bleeding, erections or their absence, are difficult for most people.
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I no longer have any illusions of myself as a creative writer. I was disabused of this notion very early in my academic life after receiving feedback on a chapter I wrote for an interdisciplinary book. The editor was an English professor and published poet. After providing kind feedback on two drafts in which he politely encouraged me to be more expressive, he announced flatly that my writing style was ‘very soc sci’. He was not wrong. Our training as social scientists, and especially psychologists I think, rewards clarity, conciseness, and coherence (the social scientist’s holy trinity) but doesn’t foster creative expression. Yet, there are those rare (infuriating) scholars whose prose is pleasurable, provocative, and effective. It is possible, apparently!
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Sarah Riley is a Professor in Critical Health Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand and the ISCHP Vice-Chair. Her work looks at how taken for granted ideas in our society open up possibilities for what people can say, think, feel and do, while shutting down others. She is particularly interested in the dynamics between neoliberalism and subjectivity, and questions of gender, embodiment, health and citizenship. She has co-authored several books including Critical Bodies (Palgrave, 2008), Technologies of Sexiness (Oxford University Press, USA, 2014) and Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018), she is currently writing Postfeminism and Body Image (Routledge), and Digital Gender, Affect and Subjectivity (Routledge).
Continue reading‘Is there something wrong with me being White?’ a New Zealand politician recently retorted when her party was challenged about its all-White front bench. She went on to say, “We’re a party of merit and we’re a party of principle – I’m not going to be distracted about people’s gender or ethnicity.” In this blog post, Mary Breheny offers an answer to her question.
By Kathryn McGuigan, Kristi Urry, Andrea LaMarre, & Gareth Treharne, September 2020
In our first ISCHP blog post, we reflected on our contributions to the Illness Snapshots Symposium at the ISCHP conference 2019 and what this provoked for us in relation to how and why we do our research. At the end of the blog we raised several questions as to how, when, why, and to what extent researchers can or should reflect on their own and others’ work as people doing (critical) research. In this follow-up post, we continue this conversation with co-presenters from the Snapshots symposium: Andrea LaMarre and Gareth Treharne. Having reflected on their own experiences in response to the questions we raised in our first post, we include their (abridged) reflections in this piece, braiding these with our own ongoing reflexive considerations. Once again, we invite readers to join this conversation by engaging with colleagues and students, with us, and with the wider ISCHP community.
Continue readingThe global health emergency caused by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, known colloquially as COVID19, since late 2019 has resulted in calls for COVID19-related topics to be prioritised in research to inform the public health response to the pandemic. Acting on the urgent need for research (and to some extent, social responsibility), many leading cross-disciplinary journals have offered publication fee waivers for research papers covering a COVID19-related topic in any field, including but not limited to chemistry, biology, medicine, economics, and psychology. Further, in many (if not all) of these cases, the open-access fee additional to the cost of publication is also relinquished.
Last month I found myself in a weird situation. It had taken me some time to make the final corrections to a paper I had had accepted (by Feminism & Psychology). I had written it under what we now call ‘normal’ conditions, and here I was, ‘shielding’ myself while working within the Covid 19 + #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) situation. The world had changed profoundly, and I realised the paper needed to change too.
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The COVID-19 pandemic was announced on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization, marking a turning point for the public health systems serving the health of constituent populations across the globe. This declaration moment is important for narrative on COVID-19 because it is the point at which it is accepted that the virus is not only travelling to different countries, but is now circulating in those countries. Governments are now required to take action to moderate the impact of the infection, reducing harm for the polity until the virus – through the mutation of its biological properties, human immunity, vaccines or some combination of these – takes its place, we hope, among the many other microbes with which human life has found co-existence.
The WHO declaration is also an important moment for the COVID-19 story because it reveals how data about notifications of diagnosed infection and deaths are used to make decisions and therefore reveals how, in the circumstances of a pandemic, it is keenly apparent that numerical and narrative futures constitute each other.
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Over the last few weeks I have been caught, suspended, and at times paralysed, between the two stark realisations that: I am incredibly privileged to be able to continue the work of teaching and research online as we go into full lock down. After all, I will be paid my full salary, I have the right technological set-up at home and I can continue to undertake meaningful work that I am passionate about.
But that also: I am absolutely struggling to continue the work of teaching and research online. My already full pre-lockdown workload has not diminished. Indeed it has increased through ever-changing institutional mandates, crisis response meetings, learning of new digital tools and increasing my support for struggling students and colleagues.
Continue readingBy Sarah Riley, April 2020
In this Book Review, Sarah Riley provides a review of Digital health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives by Deborah Lupton. This is the third review of the books from the Critical Approaches to Health series co- edited by Kerry Chamberlain and Antonia Lyons, and published by Routledge, in association with the International Society for Critical Health Psychology. (ISCHP members receive a discount on the purchase price of books in the series.)
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Joseph Mwita Kisito reviews Urban Poverty and Health Inequalities: A related Approach (by Darrin Hodgetts and Ottilie Stolte) in this third review of the books from the Critical Approaches to Health series. The series is co-edited by Kerry Chamberlain and Antonia Lyons, and published by Routledge, in association with the International Society for Critical Health Psychology. (ISCHP members receive a discount on the purchase price of books in the series.)
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