Staff Profile
Dr Eeva Sointu
Associate Professor: Sociology
I am a sociologist and I am fascinated by bodies, identities, and power. I am interested in embodied practices, bodily processes, and products used to embellish, invigorate, and manage bodies and selves. Intersecting identities and enduring inequalities are central to my thinking.
- School – York Business School
- Email – e.sointu@yorksj.ac.uk
- Phone – 01904 876 869
Teaching
My teaching draws on my research into therapeutic thinking, complementary and alternative medicines, wellbeing, affect and emotion, medical education, inequalities, and the gendered body.
I teach on the following modules:
- Gender, Body, Power
- Health, Illness and Society
- Social Research Methods I
- Sociology of Everyday life.
Research
I study configurations of power, legitimacy and meaning in the domains of health, wellbeing, and medicine. I consider identities and shifting social values as central to understanding medical work and health seeking, but also the ways in which bodies and health practices are evaluated and represented. I am captivated by the ways in which gendered bodies are represented, as well as experienced.
Publications and Conferences
Book
Sointu, E. (2012) Theorizing Complementary and Alternative Medicines: Wellbeing, Self, Class, Gender, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, UK, New York, USA.
Journal articles
Sointu, E. and Hill, D. W. (2020) Trump Therapy: Personal Identity, Political Trauma and the Contradictions of Therapeutic Practice, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 1-17.
Sointu, E. (2019) Challenges and a Super Power: How Medical Students Understand and Would Improve Health in Neoliberal Time, Critical Sociology, online first, November 13 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0896920519880242
Sointu, E. (2017) ‘Good’ patient / ‘bad’ patient: clinical learning and the entrenching of inequality, Sociology of Health and Illness, 39, 1, 63-77.
Sointu, E. (2016) Discourse, affect and affliction, The Sociological Review, 64, 312–328.
Sointu, E. (2013) Complementary and alternative medicines, embodied subjectivity and experiences of healing, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 17, 5, 439-454.
Sointu, E. (2011) Detraditionalization, Gender, and Alternative and Complementary Medicines, Sociology of Health and Illness, 33, 3, 356-371.
Sointu, E. and Woodhead, L. (2008) Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, 2, 259-276.
Sointu, E. (2006) Healing bodies, feeling bodies: embodiment and alternative and complementary health practices, Social Theory and Health 4, 3, 203-220.
Sointu, E. (2006) Recognition and the creation of wellbeing, Sociology 40, 3, 493-510.
Sointu, E. (2006) The search for wellbeing in alternative and complementary health practices, Sociology of Health and Illness 28, 3, 330-349.
Sointu, E. (2005) The rise of an ideal: tracing changing discourses of wellbeing, The Sociological Review 53, 2, 255-274.