Health Matters

In Health Matters, contributors from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary traditions address multiple dimensions of health care, such as nursing, midwifery, home care, pharmaceuticals, medical education, and palliative care. These explorations address a timely question: what role do the forms of expertise associated with evidence-based health care play in shaping how we understand and organize health services? 

The various authors collected in this volume critique instrumental, managerial ways of knowing health care. They focus on how such ways of knowing limit our understandings of and responses to health care problems and are linked with the growing commodification, individualization, and privatization of Canadian health services.

Working with analytic perspectives such as feminism, Marxist political economy, critical ethnography, science and technology studies, governmentality studies, and institutional ethnography, Health Matters demonstrates how critical social science perspectives contribute alternative perspectives about what counts as health care problems and how to best to address them.

Eric Mykhalovskiy is a professor in the Department of Sociology at York University.

Jacqueline Choiniere is an associate professor with the School of Nursing in the Faculty of Health at York University..

Pat Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a professor in the Department of Sociology at York University..

Hugh Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor and professor emeritus of Social Work, Political Economy, and Sociology at Carleton University.