A new publication, Global Perspectives & Local Issues: Medical Sociology in North-east Scotland, edited by Edwin van Teijlingen of the University of Aberdeen and Chris Yuill of The Robert Gordon University is now available.
The publication is a collected volume of papers presented at the 2005 North East Medical Sociology conference and covers a breadth of material ranging from fertility to death and drawing on case studies from different parts of the World including Scotland, Iceland and Nigeria.
The volume opens with the preliminary findings of Maureen Porter and Siladitya Bhattacharya, both of the University of Aberdeen, on the experiences of 25 couples undergoing infertility investigations and treatment in the city.
The paper shows how the couples’ decision to seek treatment transfers their private ‘problem’ into the public domain, a move which many had previously resisted.
They investigate the couples’ reasons for keeping the matter to themselves in the context of current popular and cultural images of the infertile.
Catherine Di Domenico (Abertay University), Maria Laura Di Domenico (University of Cambridge) and Taiwo Eneji (University of Ibadan, Nigeria) present some ideas on how development impinges upon southern Nigerian mothers with young children and with jobs in the formal sector of the economy.
They also explore those health issues that affect these women as they attempt to harmonise the competing demands of home and children with their jobs.
Jenny Millan, Edwin van Teijlingen (both University of Aberdeen) and Winifred Eboh (The Robert Gordon University) have examined knowledge and attitudes towards sickle cell disease screening.
The Sickle Cell Society provided and ideal population for an exploratory study looking at people’s knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards the SCD and genetic screening.
Arnar Arnason (University of Aberdeen), Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson (Temple University, USA) and Tinna Gretarsdottir (Temple University, USA) have provided an ethnographic and theoretical account of the ways in which death and grief in Iceland are changing.
Drawing on sociological and anthropological interest in the body and embodiment, and the anthropological interest in the body and embodiment, and the anthropology of death, they pursue how dead bodies, dying bodies, the bodies of care staff and grieving relatives are implicated in the embodied processes through which ‘society is constituted.
Finally Chris Yuill (The Robert Gordon University) offers a theoretical discussion on the emotional well-being of young people in relation to place focusing on school children in Portlethen.
He develops the theory of the ‘emotional landscape’, which seeks to adequately comprehend the emotional lives of young people within the landscape in which they live.
It is contended that landscape or place is an important mechanism within a range of other interweaving mechanisms such as family, peer groups and school experiences in both influencing and generating emotions.