Description

Dominant in this volume, and critical to its unique creative significance and contribution, is the conceptual unification of stigma and syndemics. Syndemics theory is increasingly renowned in medicine and social science as a crucial framework for examining and addressing pathways of communication between social and biological aspects of acute and chronic suffering in populations. While much research to date addresses known syndemics such as those involving diabetes, HIV and mental illness, Stigma Syndemics: New Directions in Biosocial Health, (PDF) discovers new directions just beginning to emerge in syndemics research – disclosing what syndemics theory can illuminate about, for instance, the health consequences of socially pathologized pregnancy or infertility, when stigmatization of reproductive options or experiences disturb women’s health. In other chapters, newly recognized syndemics affecting detained or incarcerated individuals are highlighted, proving the physical, psychological, political-economic, and structural effects of stigmatizing legal frameworks on human health, through a syndemic lens. In another place in the volume, scholars scrutinize the stigma of poverty and how it affects both oral and nutritional health. The common thread across all chapters is connections of social stigmatization, structural conditions, and how these societal forces encourage biological and disease interactions affecting human health, in areas not earlier explored through these lenses.