Why should lay epidemiology matter? Contesting public health ideas about ‘rational medical knowledge’ versus ‘citizens confused health beliefs'?
Understanding the complex and various functions of lay people’s health beliefs has long been a concern of medical sociology and critical medical humanities, which have often explored such beliefs from the perspective of religion, class, or gender. During the COVID-19 pandemic, other disciplines as well as public actors became interested in the capacity of lay peoples’ beliefs to mobilise citizens to take part in public demonstration and deliberate ignore measures of social distancing legitimized by medical knowledge. Debates and controversies emerged between those who regarded this as a form of protest towards modern governmentality and those who dismissed it as an irrational response to medical knowledge.
However, this kind of relationship between, on the one hand, a so called ‘rational’ medical knowledge and, on the other, lay understandings and interpretations of that knowledge, has parallels in other less publicly contested health topics, such as National Screening Programs.
In this presentation, by drawing on the concept of lay epidemiology, referring to knowledge and beliefs about health, disease, and risks based on non-traditional sources of information as well as selectively incorporated, adapted, and supplemented scientific medical understandings, I argue that non-attendance in the context of cervical cancer screening might be considered as a productive element in understanding why and how citizens filter and act upon seemingly rational and scientifically based medical knowledge.
Short biography on Kari Nyheim Solbrække
Kari Nyheim Solbrække is a Professor at University of Oslo. Her primary research interest are constructivist epistemologies, feminist theories as well as phenomenological thinking on embodiment and health.
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