Marjo Kolehmainen introduces a virtual issue, ‘Sociological Perspectives to Health Disparities’, of The Sociological Review journal on the occasion of the Sociological Review Foundation Public Lecture 2026. The articles are free to view until the end of September 2026.
Virtual Issue: Sociological Perspectives to Health Disparities
I am delighted to present this virtual issue of The Sociological Review journal on the occasion of the Sociological Review Foundation Public Lecture 2026 Anatomy of a Myth: Why Human Classification Can’t Cure Health Disparities – The fatal consequences of sorting people by race and sex. The lecture will be delivered by the award-winning science journalist and author Angela Saini on 2 September 2026 at SOAS, University of London. All eight papers in this collection represent compelling scholarship, previously published in The Sociological Review journal. The collection will be free to access until the end of September 2026.
The Sociological Review Foundation’s Public Lecture series showcases its long-standing commitment to communicating the value of sociological thinking for academic audiences and beyond. Saini’s lecture offers timely insights into how human classification is not a neutral tool but is rooted in discrimination and productive of injustices. The collection provides valuable explorations into how the hierarchies embedded in classificatory systems are not only visible in health outcomes but permeate our understanding of health and illness themselves. It addresses a range of pressing issues, including structural barriers to health justice and the use of medicalisation as a tool of oppression.
The articles selected for this collection showcase some of our recent scholarship that explores the entanglements of health with racist, sexist, ableist and classist legacies and histories. They speak to the importance of understanding how factors largely outside individual control result in health and illness, even when society holds individuals responsible for their own health states. Yet these papers also disrupt taken-for-granted understandings of healthy living, showing how the sociological imagination can also help us rethink what it means to live well.
We invite you to read, share and be inspired by these thought‑provoking articles that deepen and expand sociological inquiry and its wider impact. – Marjo Kolehmainen, Editor, The Sociological Review.
Featured research
- A critical commentary on ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’
Ashley, F. - Suicide as slow death: Towards a haunted sociology of suicide
Chandler, A., & Wright, S. - Narcofeminist affects: Gender, harm and fun in young women and gender diverse people’s experiences of alcohol and other drug consumption
Farrugia, A., Pienaar, K., & Dennis, F. - Care, choice, complexities: The circulations of hormone therapy in early menopause
Flore, J., Kokanović, R., Johnston-Ataata, K., Hickey, M., Teede, H., Vincent, A., & Boyle, J. A. - ‘An incorporeal disease’: COVID-19, social trauma and health injustice in four Colombian Indigenous communities
Goyes, D. R., South, N., Ramos Ñeñetofe, D. T., Cuchimba, A., Baicué, P., & Abaibira, M. A. - We’ll see things they’ll never see: Sociological reflections on race, neurodiversity and higher education
Lewis, C. J., & Arday, J. - Reconceptualising Judith Butler’s theory of ‘grievability’ in relation to the UK’s ‘war on obesity’: Personal responsibility, biopolitics and disposability
Spratt, T. J. R. - Race, rhetorical veneers and the virulence of colonial violence during COVID
Zivkovic, T.
Learn more about the public lecture here.
(Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/sor/public_lecture)