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Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with larger bodied patients (n = 20) and their healthcare practitioners (n = 22) in Canada, this paper combines micro and macro approaches in outlining a social justice approach to caring for larger patients in healthcare practice. Theoretically, we draw upon structural competency and critical consciousness to address the question of how social justice is enacted, experienced, and understood in interactions between clinicians and larger patients. Our findings highlight four key themes that provide a framework for integrating social justice into healthcare practice: (1) an awareness of one's simultaneous experience of marginalisation and privilege in the clinical interaction; (2) navigating between additive and interactive understandings of intersectionality; (3) micro and macro approaches to change; and (4) straddling the line between equity and equality. The synergies in participants' perspectives across social identities suggests that the cultivation of social justice awareness potentially mitigates some blinders of privilege. Furthermore, practitioners' social justice orientation positively impacted patient experience, with most patients expressing appreciation for having their various histories of trauma and social challenges handled compassionately during appointments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine positioned as the "right tool" to protect girls' health and sexual health, public discourse positions parents as "responsible" if they vaccinate, "irresponsible" if they do not. The problem with this binary, however, is that it cannot account for the full spectrum of responsibilities and social norms that parents enact in vaccine decisions. In this paper, and in the context of low HPV vaccination rates, I confront this binary and encourage a fuller view of adolescent health and sexual health. Using data from qualitative semi‐structured interviews with 28 Canadian mothers tasked with consenting to the HPV vaccine, I examine the complexity of this responsibility. I find HPV vaccine‐consenting mothers have normative conceptualisations of responsibility aligned with dominant interpretations of public health. Rather than expressing irresponsibility, some non‐HPV vaccine‐consenting mothers articulated alternate responsibilities, aligned with broad efforts to manage their teens' sexual health and sexuality. They extend responsibility beyond cancer protection vis‐à‐vis vaccines to a general responsibility for daughters' sexual health and self‐esteem. In conclusion, I recommend the need for a broader public health approach to HPV, which includes, and goes beyond vaccination. Moreover, I suggest that some of these alternate responsibilities be viewed as complementary to vaccination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with civil society actors in the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) sector in Canada, this article explores how these actors contribute to shaping the illness identities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the shadow of efforts to criminalize exposure to HIV. While the biographically disruptive qualities associated with an HIV diagnosis have been addressed in the medical sociology literature, we turn our attention to the key role played by ASOs as interlocutors in this process. Paying specific attention to the intersection of processes of medicalization and criminalization, we ask how they are re‐stigmatizing a condition that has shifted in the public consciousness from its earlier association with deviance and moral culpability. One important implication of our findings concerns the need to take greater account of how the illness identity and experience can be shaped by a 'biography of telling', of a renewed pressure to disclose intimate details of one's health status as a way to perform responsible practices of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rehabilitation research investigating activity participation has been largely conducted in a realist tradition that under-theorises the relationship between persons, technologies, and socio-material places. In this Canadian study we used a post-critical approach to explore activity/setting participation with 19 young people aged 14 to 23 years with complex communication and/or mobility impairments. Methods included integrated photo-elicitation, interviews, and participant observations of community-based activities. We present our results using the conceptual lens of assemblages to surface how different combinations of bodies, social meanings, and technologies enabled or constrained particular activities. Assemblages were analysed in terms of how they organised what was possible and practical for participants and their families in different contexts. The results illuminate how young people negotiated activity needs and desires in particular 'spacings' each with its own material, temporal, and social constraints and affordances. The focus on assemblages provides a dynamic analysis of how dis/abilities are enacted in and across geotemporal spaces, and avoids a reductive focus on evaluating the accessibility of static environmental features. In doing so the study reveals possible 'lines of flight' for healthcare, rehabilitation, and social care practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of what we know about the safe sex practices of people who pay for sexual services (clients) remains firmly grounded in empirical and interpretive tendencies to overemphasise the causal link between social, cultural or individual characteristics and sexual decision-making. In this study we apply Adam Green's Bourdieu-inspired sexual fields theory to examine the ways in which safe sex practices are interdependently shaped by social, personal and interpersonal forces. Using data from 697 questionnaires and 24 semi-structured interviews with Canadian clients, we implemented a series of six additive logistic regression models and contextualised the results with the interview data to reveal the relational interdependencies of intra-psychic, macro, meso and micro-level factors related to safe sex practices. The questionnaire responses and interview data used in the study were gathered from a diverse sample of clients who were over the age of 19, had paid money for sexual services on one or more occasions during their lifetime and who resided in Canada at the time of participation. Our results illustrate the ways in which factors related to the venue where sexual acts take place, clients' relationships with commercial and non-commercial partners and personal choices related to substance use interdependently inform safe sex practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]