Repairing the Brain: Social Inequalities after Stroke
Event details
This event is organised around the visit of Professor Muriel Darmon (CNRS, France) at the University of York and the forthcoming translation in English of her book Repairing the Brain: Social Inequalities after Stroke. The presentation of the book will be followed by an interdisciplinary panel discussion with Professor Beth Jefferies, Professor Angela de Bruin and Ramya Balakrishnan from the Department of Psychology, as well as Professor Karl Atkins, from the Department of Sociology.
About the book: "Brain stroke is the most common cause of adult physical impairment. After having a stroke, patients can lose the ability to walk, swallow, grasp an object, feel touch, read, count, remember, and plan things. These abilities can, however, be partially or totally regained. Rehabilitative therapy has therefore taken on major importance. It involves a vast range of professionals: physicians and nurses, but also physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, psychologists and neuropsychologists, adapted physical education teachers, and social workers. Patients, and also their relatives, are supposed to participate in the collective work of rehabilitation. Based on a 15-month ethnographic study of hospital neurology and rehabilitation units, Repairing the Brain aims to reach beyond the biological and neurological approach and decipher the social logics that govern both the assessment of deficits and their potential recovery. 'What is lost' during a stroke and 'what is regained' after is not only a question of location in the brain and how serious the neurological incident was, but also correlates with patients’ and professionals’ cultures and particularly with their class-based and gendered dispositions. For example, the study shows that female patients undergo less ambitious rehabilitation programmes than men, and middle-class patients benefit more from the same rehabilitation protocols than working-class patients. Social inequalities therefore shape outcomes and recoveries, and should be acknowledged and addressed to better understand them and to improve health outcomes for everyone."
About the speaker
Muriel Darmon is a CNRS (France) Research Professor and a former President of the French Sociological Association. As a qualitative sociologist and an ethnographer, she has studied socialization processes in various contexts (weight-loss groups, hospitals, and schools) and is leading the Gender and Health Inequalities (GENDHI) project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. Her most recent publications in English include Socialization (Polity Press, “Key Concepts”, 2024) and Becoming Anorexic: A Sociological Study (Routledge, 2017), as well as articles in The Lancet, Qualitative Sociology, European Societies, and The Sociological Review.