Comparative optimism about infection and recovery from COVID-19; Implications for adherence with lockdown advice.

Background: Comparative optimism, the belief that negative events are more likely to happen to others rather than to oneself, is well established in health risk research. It is unknown, however, whether comparative optimism also permeates people's health expectations and potentially behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objectives: Data were collected through an international survey (N = 6485) exploring people's thoughts and psychosocial behaviours relating to COVID-19.

Navigating and making choices about healthcare: The role of place.

In this paper, we examine the intersections between place and healthcare choice, drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of distinction and social space, and engaging with data from interviews with 78 Australians living in varied geographic locations. We find the status of an area is used to judge the quality of its healthcare services. Areas with high status are assumed to have better quality health services than areas of disadvantage.

Re-making the global economy of knowledge: do new fields of research change the structure of North-South relations?

How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need.

Gatekeepers in the healthcare sector: Knowledge and Bourdieu's concept of field.

Choice is an imperative for patients in the Australian healthcare system. The complexity of this healthcare 'maze', however, means that successfully navigating and making choices depends not only on the decisions of patients, but also other key players in the healthcare sector. Utilising Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus and field, we analyse the role of gatekeepers (i.

Origins and canons: medicine and the history of sociology.

Differing accounts are conventionally given of the origins of medical sociology and its parent discipline sociology. These distinct "histories" are justified on the basis that the sociological founders were uninterested in medicine, mortality and disease. This article challenges these "constructions" of the past, proposing the theorization of health not as a "late development of sociology" but an integral part of its formation.