SO4D5      Half Unit
The Sociology of Health Inequalities: Politics, States, and Time

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course is motivated by a big question: How can societies reduce health inequalities?

Such inequalities in health are observable across a wide variety of social groups, such as income, gender, and race (and their intersections). These inequalities are pervasive - in that they have been documented in almost every country for which we have data. Moreover, these inequalities are durable - in that they do not seem to be improving over time.

This course is designed to give you the time, space, and resources to develop an answer to this big question. Your ideas matter because this is a space in which there are live intellectual debates happening right now. While we do not have all the answers to this question, there are some issues on which there is a degree of consensus. It has become increasingly clear that the social determinants of health - the conditions in which people are born, live, work, and die - play a crucial role in explaining disparities in health outcomes. These social determinants are, in turn, shaped by macro-societal structures (such as policies, norms, and institutions) which alter the conditions in which people live. This course is concerned with these macro-societal structures and wants to help you understand how sociological theory can be used to determine whether certain policies, norms, or institutions may increase or reduce health inequalities. In doing this, we will spend time thinking about how socio-economic inequalities are remade by these macro-societal structures in a number of different areas, including: political institutions, government spending, tax policy, climate change, and anti-discrimination legislation. We also situate health inequalities in their historical context and consider modern-day puzzles in this area, such why the economically egalitarian Scandinavian countries seem to have high health inequalities.

This does not mean that these policies and institutions are the only drivers of health inequalities. They are not, nor is this course going to cover everything that matters in this area. We only have a limited amount of time and so I have chosen topics that are both substantively important but also intellectually open.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Presentation

Essay

Marmot, M. 2015. `The Health Gap'. London: Bloomsbury.
Stuckler D. and Basu S. 2013. `The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills', London: Allen Lane.
Schrecker T. and C. Bambra. 2015. `How politics makes us sick'. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Pollack, H. A., R. F.  Schoeni, J. S. House, and G. A. Kaplan, eds. 2010. `Making Americans Healthier: Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy'. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in May