Overview

Editors:

Christine Beasley
University of Adelaide , SA

Megan Warin
Durham University, UK

Many Public Health experts employ frameworks which are not recognized as involving theoretical presumptions. They remain unconvinced by the relevance of theorizing. As such presumptions remain implicit they also remain opaque, undeveloped and, problematically, less amenable to discussion, critique, reassessment and development.

Re-imagining Preventive Health: Theoretical Perspectives is concerned with developing new thinking in Preventive Health. Its aim is to consider theories shaping the field today, and to critique and re-imagine these theories, in order to provide the grounding for robust debate and to advance a more developed theoretical base for this field.

This Special Edition confronts the relative invisibility of theoretical frameworks in Public Health generally, and Preventive Health more specifically, and provides a multi-disciplinary forum which analyses and strengthens the underdeveloped interpretive social dimension of Preventive Health. This collection draws together papers engaging in critical debate about current theoretical frameworks for understanding preventive and interventionist elements in health.

The papers in concert offer a counter to the biomedical, individualistic, and unreflectively empirical orientation of most writings in Preventive Heath. They cover a number of theoretical vocabularies and issues, including obesity, smoking, and sexuality. The central intention throughout is to move away from popular theoretical assumptions and to offer theoretical innovations. As such this Edition is important reading for those with a special interest in preventive health.

Table of Contents

Guest Editorial
Christine Beasley, Megan Warin

The challenge of pleasure: Re-imagining sexuality and sexual health
Christine Beasley

Consuming bodies: Mall walking and the possibilities of consumption
Megan Warin, Vivienne Moore, Michael Davies, Karen Turner

Hazardous good intentions? Unintended consequences of the project of prevention
Dorothy H Broom BA (Carleton College) MA (Illinois)

The government of girth
John Coveney

Biopolitical technologies of prevention
Rosalyn Diprose

The politics of research management: Reflections on the gap between what we ‘know' (about SDH) and what we do
Carol Bacchi

Trust in the health system: An analysis and extension of the social theories of Giddens and Luhmann
Samantha Meyer, Paul Ward, John Coveney, Wendy Rogers

Book Reviews

Understanding Treatment without Consent: An Analysis of the Work of the Mental Health Commission
Ian Shaw, Hugh Middleton and Jeffrey Cohen (eds)
Reviewed by Pauline Savy

Social Causes of Health and Disease
William C. Cockerham
Reviewed by Mildred Blaxter

The Blackwell Companion to Social Work (3rd Edition)
Martin Davies (ed)
Reviewed by Fiona Gardner

A Social History of Dying
Allan Kellahear
Reviewed by Norelle Lickiss