Recalibrating Stigma - by Gareth Thomas & Oli Williams & Tanisha Spratt & Amy Chandler (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 understanding health and illness.

Review Quotes

"This ambitious book offers new perspectives on how to bring together - in varied ways - interests in interactional stigma with the political economies that inform them. A vital intervention." Janice McLaughlin, Newcastle University

"Re-calibrating Stigma offers myriad sociological insights and reflections on a challenging topic. Readers should find much of interest in this text when grappling with health-related stigma across diverse domains." Lee F. Monaghan, University of Limerick

"This exemplary collection aptly demonstrates the importance of understanding stigma in contemporary society as a function of structural and interactional processes. Each chapter offers a nuanced sociological analysis, pushing readers to think deeply about the stigma concept, its definition, and use in research. This excellent book will be of significant interest to scholars of stigma in many contexts, and students of medical sociology, in particular." Stacey Hannem, Wilfrid Laurier University

"A very impressive and original body of work. This collection is a state-of-the-art contribution to the sociology of stigma and to the ways in which it is now to be theorised and retheorised. Admirably edited, it covers multiple facets of stigma and stigmatisation in novel, subtle and illuminating ways. It will become a much-cited text within the sociology of health and illness, and further afield too." Graham Scambler Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University College London, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

"In Recalibrating Stigma, Thomas, Williams, Spratt and Chandler take on the vital and timely task of creating more precision around a central yet slippery sociological construct. The effort is important to almost every aspect of health as their myriad cases show, demonstrating why we must better connect individual experiences to wider, powerful forces in which stigma - and the suffering it so powerfully engenders - is created and reproduced." Alexandra Brewis, Arizona State University

About the Author

Gareth M. Thomas is Reader in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.

Oli Williams is Lecturer in Co-designing Healthcare Interventions at King's College London.

Tanisha Spratt is Senior Lecturer in Racism and Health at King's College London.

Amy Chandler is Professor of the Sociology of Health and Illness at the University of Edinburgh.