Lifestylisation of the social: The government of diabetes care in Denmark

Testing Care and Morality: Everyday Testing During COVID-19 in Denmark

COVID-testing was central to control the spread of infection in Denmark. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we show that testing was not just a diagnostic sign; it was also a biosocial practice that enacted a public health morality, centered on responsibility, care, and belonging. We argue that testing led to a public healthicization of everyday life, as it moralized individual and collective behavior and created a moral divide between the tested and the untested. By attending to COVID-19 testing as a material-semiotic sign, we show how testing is embedded within a particular cultural and moral framework of the Danish welfare state.

"Lifestyle, finitude, or inequality?": Illness explanation in Kathlyn Conway's and Arthur Frank's cancer memoirs

The lifestyle model, which attributes etiological power and moral responsibility to the individual, is dominant in health promotion discourse. While sociologists rightly critique this model's individualistic outlook, there has been insufficient distinction between the two anti-individualistic models that commonly inform their work: the well-known "sociological model" and the culturally influential but under-conceptualized model tentatively called the "finitude model." Not only is there insufficient awareness of the different etiological causes (inequality and human fragility) and political orientations (redistribution and recognition) underlying the sociological and finitude models, but there is also insufficient recognition of how the finitude model may inform illness explanation. To raise awareness about the existence and analytical utility of the finitude model, I elucidate its core assumptions through a brief review of some influential texts in late-modern health politics. Further, I illustrate the empirical utility of the notion of the finitude model by analyzing how it is used to explain illness in Arthur Frank's and Kathlyn Conway's influential cancer memoirs. Thematic analysis of the memoirs produces two major findings. First, Frank and Conway rely on the finitude model to claim victimhood and blame the blamers. Second, they seem unaware of the double-edged character of such a model, which tends to downplay how social inequality shapes health. My analysis reveals the one-sidedness of both the finitude and sociological models, and that any illness explanation therefore needs to integrate both anti-individualistic models to challenge the lifestyle model successfully.

Contributions and Challenges in Health Lifestyles Research

The concept of health lifestyles is moving scholarship beyond individual health behaviors to integrated bundles of behaviors undergirded by group-based identities and norms. Health lifestyles research merges structure with agency, individual-level processes with group-level processes, and multifaceted behaviors with norms and identities, shedding light on why health behaviors persist or change and on the reproduction of health disparities and other social inequalities. Recent contributions have applied new methods and life course perspectives, articulating health lifestyles's dynamic relationships to social contexts and demonstrating their implications for health and development. Culturally focused work has shown how health lifestyles function as signals for status and identity and perpetuate inequalities. We synthesize literature to articulate recent advances and challenges and demonstrate how health lifestyles research can strengthen health policies and inform scholarship on inequalities. Future work emphasizing health lifestyles's collective nature and attending to upstream social structures will further elucidate complex social processes.