Bryan S. Turner is one of the world’s leading sociologists of religion; he has also devoted significant attention to sociological theory, the study of human rights, and the sociology of the body. In Vulnerability and Human Rights (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), he presents an interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion. His current research involves the role of religion in contemporary Asia and the changing nature of citizenship in a globalizing world. Turner has written, coauthored, or edited more than seventy books and more than two hundred articles and chapters. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Sage, 2008), first published in 1984, is in its third edition. He is also an author or editor of The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, and The Sage Handbook of Sociology. He is a founding editor of the journals Body & Society, Citizenship Studies, and Journal of Classical Sociology. Turner comes to the GC from Wellesley College, where he was Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor; he is also professor of social and political thought at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds and has been awarded the Doctor of Letters from both Flinders University in South Australia and the University of Cambridge.
This new edition includes a completely revised chapter on mental health, new chapters on the sociology of the body and on the relationship between health and risk in contemporary societies. Author Bryan S. Turner assesses the ways in which different social theorists have interpreted the experience of health and disease and the social relations and power structures involved in the medical practice. He examines health as an aspect of social action and looks at the problem of health at three levels-the individual, the social, and the societal. Among the perspectives analyzed are Parsons's view of the "sick role" and the patient's relation to society, Foucault's critique of medical models of madness and sexuality, Marxist and feminist debates on the relation of health and medicine to capitalism and patriarchy, and the contribution of Beck to the sociological understanding of environmental pollution and hazard in the politics of health. The fully revised edition of this successful textbook, Medical Power and Social Knowledge, Second Edition, provides a comprehensive introduction to medical sociology and an assessment of its significance for social theory and the social sciences.
