Staff Profile
Dr Eeva Sointu
Associate Professor
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.
My BA (in Religious Studies), MA (in Religion, Culture & Society) and PhD (in Sociology) are all from Lancaster University. Before starting at York St John University in 2018, I worked for ten years at Smith College USA, where I was a tenured Associate Professor in Sociology. I was also briefly an Honorary Visiting Fellow and a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of York.
I am keen to supervise qualitative PhD research pertaining to gender, the body, health and wellbeing, and medical education.
- School – York Business School
- Email – e.sointu@yorksj.ac.uk
- Phone – 01904 876 869
- Research - View my work in RaY
Teaching
My teaching draws on my research into the gendered body, reproduction of inequality, therapeutic thinking, complementary and alternative medicines, wellbeing, affect and emotion, and medical education. While my teaching is research-led, my research also intimately entwines with and benefits from my teaching.
I convene and teach the following third-year modules:
- Gender, Body, Power
- Health, Illness and Society
Health, Illness and Society focuses on the entwining of health with ideologies and inequalities. We consider ways in which health, illness and medicine are neither natural nor neutral, but invested with culturally and historically specific meaning. While health and illness are bodily and physical, they are also socially and politically produced, as well as intimately entangled with power to define and treat afflictions, and to judge those who may be afflicted.
Gender, Body, Power is premised on bodies not being simply ‘natural’. Rather, our bodies embody the social, while the social imbues our embodied experience. Power and powerlessness suffuse, inscribe, and discipline bodies. Our bodies are read as signs of our identities, but also seen to embody our success in measuring up to myriad social values. While the body is shaped and evaluated in relation social norms, the body is also something more. It is through our feeling bodies that we exist in and know the world, as well as connect with others.
Research
I study configurations of power, representation, legitimacy and meaning in the domains of gender and embodiment, health and wellbeing, and medicine and medical education. 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 understood and evaluated. I am captivated by the manner in which gendered and sexual bodies are represented, and by the ways in which social and cultural ideas entwine with embodied experience.
Publications
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. (2022) Trump Therapy: Personal Identity, Political Trauma and the Contradictions of Therapeutic Practice, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25, 3, 880-896.
Sointu, E. (2020) Challenges and a Super Power: How Medical Students Understand and Would Improve Health in Neoliberal Times, Critical Sociology 46(6) 851-865.
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.
Encyclopaedia entries
Sointu, E. (in press) Complementary and Alternative medicine, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society, Second Edition. William C. Cockerham, Jonathan Gabe, Stella Quah & J. Michael Ryan (eds). Wiley-Blackwell.
Sointu, E. (2021) Complementary and Alternative medicine, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology. William C. Cockerham (ed). Wiley-Blackwell.
Sointu, E. (2014) Complementary and Alternative Medicines, Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society. William C. Cockerham, Robert Dingwall and Stella R. Quah (eds.). Wiley and Sons.
Professional Activities
I serve on the Editorial Board of The Sociological Review, and I hold an honorary position, the Title of Docent, in Sociology at University of Turku in Finland.
