Research Handbook on Socio-Legal Studies of Medicine and Health

‘Wide-ranging and thoughtfully curated, this collection demonstrates just how far the tentacles of healthcare and law extend into social life. Taken together, though, these chapters suggest that the epistemic reach of both law and medicine ultimately exceed their grasp, a conclusion that practitioners and scholars alike will both rue and applaud. With such provocative and carefully researched pieces, this volume is sure to foster a deep rethinking of socio-legal studies of medicine and health. –Carol A. Heimer, Northwestern University, US

‘Handbooks are often conceived to tie together already-established research fields. With the Research Handbook on Socio-Legal Studies of Medicine and Health, Anna Kirkland and Marie-Andreé Jacob have in fact inaugurated an important new field of study while generously acknowledging its diverse ancestries. I’ve always thought that STS should instead have been dubbed TLS (technoscience, law and society) whether in studies of health, climate change, migration, inequality or their interconnections. Through an empirically rich set of chapters, handbook contributors perceptively show how socio-legal problems (from femicide to alternative medicine, genetic ancestry testing and gun violence) in highly (bio)medicalized societies throughout the world are always historically and ethnographically situated. This Handbook will be of equal interest to legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, bioethicists, philosophers and STS scholars.’ –Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

‘One of the strengths of socio-legal studies is to show how seemingly mundane and technical practices and artifacts, such as clinical protocols or bureaucratic procedures, shape social realities: how they include and exclude people, and redistribute duties and entitlements. This fantastic volume gives a flavour of the breath and diversity of this lively (inter-)discipline, and also pushes its boundaries into new topics and methodological terrains.’ –Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna, Austria

Edited by Marie-Andrée Jacob, University of Leeds, UK and Anna Kirkland, University of Michigan, US